Nation-Building in the Post-Socialist Region: The Everyday Construction of Identity After Communism 1784539414, 9781784539412

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction: The Silent Noise of (Everyday) Identities
Doggy Bags and Post-Soviet Identities
Limp Flags and Noisy Invisible Identities (Post-Socialism and the Everyday)
This Book's Approach
Structure of the Book and Main Themes
1. `I'm Only Half!' Schooling and Strategies of Belonging Among Adolescents from Minority Ethnic Backgrounds in Russia
Introduction
Schooling in Post-Soviet Russia as an Arena of Competing Nationhood Claims
School Practices of Ethnic Ascription
Strategies of Belonging: Portraits of Pupils
`I Like to be Taken for a Tatar’: Passing as a (Christianised) Tatar
Conclusion
2. Borders of a Borderland: Experiencing Identity in Moldova Today
Introduction
State-Building and Nation-Building in Moldova
Competing Identity Categories
Nationalising Collective Memory in the Public Spaces
The Stencils of Identity
Transformations of Identity through the Lens of the Everyday
Language, Asymmetrical Power Relations and Everyday Practices
Conclusion
3. Teaching the National through Geography and Nature: Banal Nationalism in Primary Schools in Serbia and Croatia
Introduction
Methodology
Findings: Textbook Content Analysis
Discussion and Conclusion
4. Why Nations Sell: Reproduction of Everyday Nationhood through Advertising in Russia and Belarus
Introduction
Nation-Building and Economic Transformations in Russia and Belarus: A Historical Background
Advertising in Russia: Empire, Nation and In Between
Advertising in Belarus: The Struggle for Banality
Conclusion
5. Money Can't Buy It? Everyday Geopolitics in Post-Soviet Russia
Introduction
Why Prosume Foreign Policy?
Speaking Geopolitics
Framing Geopolitics
Symbolising Geopolitics
Eating Geopolitics
Conclusion
6. Turbofolk as a Means of Identification: Music Practices as Examples of the National in Everyday Life
Introduction
The Setting for the Birth of Turbofolk
Identification with Turbofolk
Contradictions in Evaluating Turbofolk Music
Impact of Turbofolk Music on its Consumers
Autochthonous Turbofolk as an Illustration of Diasporic Identity
`Turbofashion', `Turbostyle'
Conclusion
7. Something Bulgarian for Dinner: Bulgarian Popular Cuisine as a Selling Point
Introduction
Why Food as a National Practice?
What is Food as a National Consumption Practice?
How to Read the Food as Text
The Structure of the Menu: The Sign System
The Words of the National Culinary Discourse
The Twenty-First-Century Image of Bulgarian National Cuisine
8. Making Modern Mongolians: Gender Roles and Everyday Nation-Building in Contemporary Mongolia
Building a Nation for Mongolians
Nomadism as Practice of Everyday Nation-Building
Forging Ties to the Nation via Religious Practices
Chenggis Khaan Legacies
Contribution of Women to Mongolian Everyday Nation-Building
Conclusion
Conclusion: When Post-Socialism Meets the Everyday
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Abel Polese is a scholar, development worker and writer. To date he is the author of 15 books, over 100 peer-reviewed chapters and articles and has designed capacity building and training programmes on the Caucasus, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America (funded by, inter alia, the EC, UNDP, Erasmus National Agencies and Irish-aid). His forthcoming book The Scopus Diaries: The (Il)Logics of Academic Survival is also a blog and is intended as a guide to think strategically of one’s academic career. Oleksandra Seliverstova is Junior Researcher at the Department of Political Science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University. In her PhD research she focused on exploration of everyday nationalism and bottom-up nation-building through consumer culture in multi-ethnic societies. In 2008 she received her MA in Eastern European Studies from the Free University Berlin, where her research focused on ethnic conflicts in post-Soviet areas. Her BA in Business Administration was awarded by the International Christian University, Kiev in 2005. Between 2005 and 2006 she worked as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Theology and Liberal Arts, in Odessa (Ukraine). For several years she was engaged in the NGO sector in Ukraine and worked as a research assistant. Emilia Pawłusz is Early Stage Researcher in the Marie Curie ITN programme at the School of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University. She obtained her MA in sociology and social anthropology in 2011 from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland. Between 2012 and 2014 she was a visiting researcher within the Swedish Institute Visby Programme at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at So¨derto¨rn University, Sweden. Her fields of interest include Baltic choral singing, nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe and visual anthropology. Jeremy Morris is a social anthropologist working on societal and cultural issues in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Having written extensively on contemporary Russian culture in the past, his current research is focused on ethnographic and interpretive approaches to understanding ‘actually lived experience’ in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has recently received research funding to investigate the negotiation of worker identity under post-socialism (British Academy 2010–11).

‘This is an extremely interesting book which fills an important gap in the existing literature. The well-selected and inventive chapters cover a wide and diverse range of interrelated subjects and contribute clearly to shedding necessary light onto nation-building processes in the postsocialist area. The editors have managed to draw together a strong mix of junior and more senior scholars, and the book engages with current and relevant research in the field throughout.’ Filippo Menga, Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Reading ‘What happens when post-socialism meets the everyday? This book is the answer. An excellent collection of studies showing the pluri-faceted nature of identity and how it may be performed by different actors in a variety of ways regardless of, or even in contrast to, state official narratives.’ Marcello Mollica, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, University of Messina ‘This edited volume brings together different views on post-socialist identity from an everyday perspective. Going beyond the common statec entric approac hes, c ontributors demonstrate the c entrality of the individual and everyday prac tic es in identity c onstruc tion and rec onfiguration. In the proc ess, they break new ground and shed important light onto how these proc esses have (re)shaped identity markers in the post-Socialist region. This will be stimulating reading for a broad audience.’ Maria Raquel Freire, Jean Monnet Chair, University of Coimbra

INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM

The Everyday Construction of Post-Socialist Identities

Edited by ABEL POLESE, OLEKSANDRA SELIVERSTOVA, EMILIA PAWŁUSZ AND JEREMY MORRIS

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright Editorial Selection © Abel Polese, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Emilia Pawłusz and Jeremy Morris, 2018 Copyright Individual Chapters © Timofey Agarin, Marharyta Fabrykant, Elizaveta Gaufman, Rayna Gavrilova, Jeremy Morris, Ágnes Patakfalvi-Czirják, Tamara Pavasović Trošt, Emilia Pawłusz, Abel Polese, Līga Rudzīte, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Dilyara Suleymanova, Petra Št’astná and Csaba Zahorán Abel Polese, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Emilia Pawłusz and Jeremy Morris have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3941-2 PB: 978-1-8386-0383-0 ePDF: 978-1-8386-0874-3 eBook: 978-1-8386-0873-6 International Library of Historical Studies 111 Typeset by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To our families

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction The Silent Noise of (Everyday) Identities Abel Polese, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Emilia Pawłusz and Jeremy Morris Doggy Bags and Post-Soviet Identities Limp Flags and Noisy Invisible Identities (Post-Socialism and the Everyday) This Book’s Approach Structure of the Book and Main Themes 1.

‘I’m Only Half!’ Schooling and Strategies of Belonging Among Adolescents from Minority Ethnic Backgrounds in Russia Dilyara Suleymanova Introduction Schooling in Post-Soviet Russia as an Arena of Competing Nationhood Claims School Practices of Ethnic Ascription Strategies of Belonging: Portraits of Pupils ‘I Like to be Taken for a Tatar’: Passing as a (Christianised) Tatar Conclusion

xi xiii 1

1 4 10 12

17 17 20 23 27 30 33

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Borders of a Borderland: Experiencing Identity in Moldova Today A´gnes Patakfalvi-Czirja´k and Csaba Zahora´n Introduction State-Building and Nation-Building in Moldova Competing Identity Categories Nationalising Collective Memory in the Public Spaces The Stencils of Identity Transformations of Identity through the Lens of the Everyday Language, Asymmetrical Power Relations and Everyday Practices Conclusion

3.

4.

Teaching the National through Geography and Nature: Banal Nationalism in Primary Schools in Serbia and Croatia Tamara Pavasovic´ Trosˇt

36 36 38 40 44 46 47 50 53

57

Introduction Methodology Findings: Textbook Content Analysis Discussion and Conclusion

57 60 62 79

Why Nations Sell: Reproduction of Everyday Nationhood through Advertising in Russia and Belarus Marharyta Fabrykant

83

Introduction Nation-Building and Economic Transformations in Russia and Belarus: A Historical Background Advertising in Russia: Empire, Nation and In Between Advertising in Belarus: The Struggle for Banality Conclusion

83 87 90 96 102

CONTENTS

5.

6.

Money Can’t Buy It? Everyday Geopolitics in Post-Soviet Russia Elizaveta Gaufman

104

Introduction Why Prosume Foreign Policy? Speaking Geopolitics Framing Geopolitics Symbolising Geopolitics Eating Geopolitics Conclusion

104 106 108 111 115 118 120

Turbofolk as a Means of Identification: Music Practices as Examples of the National in Everyday Life 123 Petra Sˇt’astna´ Introduction The Setting for the Birth of Turbofolk Identification with Turbofolk Contradictions in Evaluating Turbofolk Music Impact of Turbofolk Music on its Consumers Autochthonous Turbofolk as an Illustration of Diasporic Identity ‘Turbofashion’, ‘Turbostyle’ Conclusion

7.

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Something Bulgarian for Dinner: Bulgarian Popular Cuisine as a Selling Point Rayna Gavrilova Introduction Why Food as a National Practice? What is Food as a National Consumption Practice? How to Read the Food as Text The Structure of the Menu: The Sign System The Words of the National Culinary Discourse The Twenty-First-Century Image of Bulgarian National Cuisine

123 127 129 132 134 135 138 141 144 144 146 147 149 153 155 160

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Making Modern Mongolians: Gender Roles and Everyday Nation-Building in Contemporary Mongolia Timofey Agarin and Lı¯ga Rudzı¯te Building a Nation for Mongolians Nomadism as Practice of Everyday Nation-Building Forging Ties to the Nation via Religious Practices Chenggis Khaan Legacies Contribution of Women to Mongolian Everyday Nation-Building Conclusion

164 165 168 171 173 176 180

Conclusion When Post-Socialism Meets the Everyday Abel Polese, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Emilia Pawłusz and Jeremy Morris

183

Bibliography Index

189 211

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures Figure 3.1 ‘Croatia at the contact of three cultural-civilizational circles: Central Europe, the Mediterranean, Southeast Europe’ (Tisˇma 2015:23).

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Figure 3.2 ‘Natural population growth of Serbia’ (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015:73).

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Figure 3.3 ‘Forced migrations of Serbs from Croatia in 1995’ (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015:74; the same picture appears in Milosˇevic´ and Brankov 2015:62).

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Figure 5.1 Source: Vk.com, ‘AntiMaidan public page’ Translation: We are like three sisters in one flat.

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Tables Table I.1 Four Waves of Nation-building Studies and Four Different Interpretations in Scholarly Debates Table 3.1 Summary of Identity and Nationhood Messages Found in Serbian and Croatian Fourth-grade Nature and Society and Eighth-grade Geography Textbooks Table 6.1 Lyrics from the song ‘Nasˇa sudbina’

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Timofey Agarin is Lecturer in Politics and Ethnic Conflict at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. His research interest is ethnic politics and their impact on transition from communism and particularly on the interplay of nation-state building with social and institutional change. In the past he has looked at the dynamic relations between national identity, minority issues and ethnic conflict across the post-communist region. Using the cases of institutions tasked with minority protection, he investigates how democratising states cooperate with one another as well as with international organisations to reduce ethnic tensions domestically and ensure peace and stability across the post-communist region. He is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict at Queen’s University Belfast, Chair of IPSA Research Committee ‘Politics and Ethnicty’ and Convenor of PSA Standing Group on Ethnopolitics. Marharyta Fabrykant is Senior Lecturer in data analysis and crosscultural research at the Belarusian State University, Minsk and a Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Her research interests are nationalism, national identity, and national history narratives, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. She has authored and coauthored three books and a number of articles, including, among the most recent, Countries versus Disciplines: Comparative Analysis of Post-Soviet Transformations in Academic Publications from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (with Tregubova N., Fabrykant M. and Marchenko A., 2017).

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Elizaveta Gaufman is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen. Her research focuses on the impact of verbal and visual enemy images in new media, including representations of gender and ethnicity. Her book Security Threats and Public Perception: Digital Russia and the Ukraine Crisis was published in 2017. Rayna Gavrilova holds an MA and PhD in History from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria and teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at the same university. She has been a Fulbright fellow in Harvard University; a research fellow at the Annenberg Institute of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, PA; research fellow at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris; and visiting professor in Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN. Gavrilova teaches classes in Historical Anthropology of Southeastern Europe, Anthropology of Food and Eating and the City as a Way of Life. Her book The Familial Scene: Anthropological History of the Family Eating in Bulgaria was published in 2016. Jeremy Morris is a social anthropologist working on societal and cultural issues in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Having written extensively on contemporary Russian culture in the past, his current research is focused on ethnographic and interpretive approaches to understanding ‘actually lived experience’ in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has recently received research funding to investigate the negotiation of worker identity under post-socialism (British Academy 2010– 11). ´ gnes Patakfalvi-Czirja´k studied Social Anthropology, working at A the Hungarian Academy of Science, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Minority Studies. Her main fields of interest include nationalism, popular culture, and cultural sociology in Central and Eastern Europe. She is doing her PhD at Pe´cs University about the Szekler regio in Romania. She is working on papers about symbolical conflicts between ethnic groups and their aspects in the popular culture, and about popular music and the far-right. She spent six months in Chisinau researching the process of constructing national identities.

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Emilia Pawłusz is Early-stage Researcher in the Marie Curie ITN programme at the School of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University. She obtained her MA in sociology and social anthropology in 2011 from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland. Between 2012 and 2014 she was a visiting researcher within the Swedish Institute Visby Programme at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at So¨derto¨rn University, Sweden. Her fields of interest include Baltic choral singing, nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe and visual anthropology. Abel Polese is a scholar, development worker and writer. To date he is the author of 15 books, over 100 peer-reviewed chapters and articles and has designed capacity building and training programmes on the Caucasus, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America (funded by, inter alia, the EC, UNDP, Erasmus National Agencies and Irish-aid). His forthcoming book The Scopus Diaries: The (Il)Logics of Academic Survival is also a blog and is conceived as a guide to think strategically of one’s academic career. Lı¯ga Rudzı¯te is Marie Curie Fellow and a PhD student of Economics and Business Administration at Tallinn University of Technology, researching the impact of private sector development assistance projects on entrepreneurial moralities in Kyrgyzstan. Her Master’s degree research explored the role of embodied knowledge in development, studying the interactions between development practitioners and beneficiaries in Mongolia. Prior to that she was engaged in civil society organisations and movements in Latvia and on EU level, consulting on and advocating for better social inclusion and international development cooperation policies and practice. Her academic interests are international development theory and practice, political economy of development, global political economy of gender and sexuality, and politics of inclusion and empowerment with a particular focus on Central Asia and Mongolia. Oleksandra Seliverstova is Junior Researcher at the Department of Political Science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University (TU). In her PhD research she focused on exploration of everyday nationalism and bottom-up nation-building through consumer

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culture in multi-ethnic societies. In 2008 she received her MA in Eastern European Studies from the Free University Berlin, where her research focused on ethnic conflicts in post-Soviet areas. Her BA in Business Administration was awarded by the International Christian University, Kiev in 2005. Between 2005 and 2006 she worked as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Theology and Liberal Arts, in Odessa, Ukraine. For several years she was engaged in the NGO sector in Ukraine and worked as a research assistant. Dilyara Suleymanova is Post-doctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Zurich. She received her PhD from the University of Zurich with an anthropological research on education in the Republic of Tatarstan, where she explored the implications of the Russian educational reforms for schooling and regional politics of belonging. Along with anthropology of education, identity politics, language and ethnicity, her research interests include post-Soviet Islam and Islamic education as well as more recently the dynamic of conflict narratives in the diaspora. She has written, among others, on post-Soviet notions of morality and Islamic madrasa education, on Tatar youth identities on the social network Vkontakte and on linguistic policies in Tatarstan. Petra Sˇt’astna´ is a PhD student in the Department of Ethnology, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. She finished her MA in Balkan studies, where she researched various topics connected to communities from former Yugoslav countries in diaspora. Her main academic focus consists of contemporary migration waves, ethnic minorities and popular culture within the framework of cultural anthropology. Currently she lives in New Zealand, as she has just completed her exchange at the University of Otago. Tamara Pavasovic´ Trosˇt is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She received her PhD in Sociology from Harvard University (2012), with a dissertation examining the interplay between history and ethnic identity among Croatian and Serbian youth. She has published about issues of everyday identity, populism, history education, collective memory and sports and

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nationalism, as well as the relationship between class and ethnic animosity, with a geographic focus on the Western Balkans. Csaba Zahora´n studied History at the University of Eo¨tvo¨s Lora´nd in Budapest. After his doctoral studies he started to work at the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 2012 and 2015 he worked at the Hungarian Institute in Bratislava; since 2016 he has worked at the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Lendu¨let/Momentum/Trianon 100 Research Group). He is the director of the Terra Recognita Foundation. His main areas of research are the Szeklerland region in the framework of Romanian and Hungarian nation-building, interethnic relations in Central and Eastern Europe and the memory of the Trianon Peace Treaty.

INTRODUCTION THE SILENT NOISE OF (EVERYDAY) IDENTITIES Abel Polese, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Emilia Pawłusz and Jeremy Morris

The flags hang limply (Billig 1995:40–1, see also Skey 2015), but how do we know that people don’t notice them? And that by not noticing them, they are making us compliant national subjects? (Fox 2016:4)

Doggy Bags and Post-Soviet Identities To many scholars of the former Soviet region, but also to many ordinary citizens of the former USSR, Georgia is a place of abundance where Pantagruelian meals are served at any hour of the day and wine flows in streams. It is no accident that Georgians say ‘yes, we have a meal where no wine is served. It’s called breakfast’. Some years ago, a friend decided to move to Georgia with her partner. They happened sometimes to meet Georgian friends for a meal. Among the many aspects of Georgian hospitality there is the (quasi-) moral obligation to pay for your guests and to order for them, so that they get to try all the delicacies that the country has to offer. As one might imagine, ordering food for three people often turned out into an exercise aimed at flooding the table with food that could easily feed an extended family or a small tribe. Upset by the prospective waste, at least initially,

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in a clumsy attempt to save food she mentioned that the food was good and she would have liked to take some of it to her place to eat it later. Her hosts were of course delighted and simply ordered more food, this time to be packaged for takeaway. Doggy bags have no future in Georgia, at least not for the moment. Abundance and generosity in food serving is not necessarily something unique to Georgia. Many populations in the world are proud to display their hospitality as a confirmation of their uniqueness. Hospitality is something proper to the human race, although in different forms and expressions. Still, it is not uncommon to visit a country whose inhabitants will contend that ‘there is no people as hospitable as . . . ours’. True, Georgians have a saying, ‘a guest is from God’, and think that even an enemy, once in the home, should be honoured as a guest. However, what is important here is not who the most hospitable people are, but how the feeling of being the most hospitable people affects perception of one’s Georgianness. While to a naı¨ve first-time traveller, this claim might sound very close to reality, the scholar is more likely to concentrate not on the uniqueness of the feature but on the claim to uniqueness. To a Georgian, the claim of being uniquely hospitable, generous and friendly will be an obligatory step in performing their Georgianness, make them feel ‘authentically Georgian’ and place them in opposition to the idea of what ‘non-Georgians’ are. Claims of the existence, or absence, of certain practices are as important as the practices themselves. Herzfeld (2004) has defined ‘cultural intimacy’ as ‘the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality . . . [so to argue that] state ideologies and the intimacy of everyday social life are revealingly similar’ (2004:3). Following this claim this book is an attempt to go beyond statecentred accounts of national identity construction and to bring to bear an everyday perspective on post-socialist identities. We borrow concepts from a growing debate on the forms of nationalism experienced and renegotiated at the level of everyday life (Antonsich 2015; Edensor 2002; Foster 2002; Fox 2006, 2016; Skey 2011) to engage with a poststate framework for the study of post-socialist identity. The power of consumption and mundane practices has been largely acknowledged in the Western world (Edensor 2002; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008;

INTRODUCTION

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Wilk 1999). However, research has somehow underestimated the seemingly mundane little actions that confirm and develop identities in the post-socialist world. The role of the state in the construction of postsocialist identities is well established (Arel 1995; Galbreath 2005; Isaacs 2010; Kolstø 2000; Kuzio 2001, 2002; Tishkov 1997). In contrast, national identity, perceptions and narratives are also something that ordinary people make sense of independently. In this process they may give a different importance to, or prioritise, identity markers that the state feels as secondary or that are non-state-originated. By doing this, they contribute to the renegotiation of a national identity and to the construction of alternative markers that are, in our view, as important as state-originated markers. Through evidence collected in a variety of situations by our authors, this collection shows that the formation of somebody’s feeling of belonging to one specific nation can occur gradually through routine cooking of traditional dishes, while watching TV commercials or simply chatting on social media. This is, in principle, challenging to demonstrate. It could be argued that people all over the world cook and watch TV and that a significant portion of the world population is active on social media. What makes these actions, or rather their meaning to people, different, in our view, is the importance attached to these actions that ultimately reshapes the perceptions of self (imagined) community, the society they operate in and the state they are supposed to be faithful to. We are not the first to claim this. Previous studies on performances of national rituals related to social tea-drinking in Japan (Surak 2012) and chewing qa¯t in Yemen (Wedeen 2009), washing up in Sweden and Denmark (Linde-Laursen 1993) and driving in Britain (Edensor 2006), have emphasised the perceptional aspect of identity, a thing that Billig (1995), Foster (2002), Miller-Idriss (2006), Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008), Hearn (2007), Lofgren (1993), Skey (2010, 2011) and Edensor (2002, 2006) have attempted to conceptualise in their efforts to study the mundane forms of expressions of a nation. However, studies that demonstrate how national identities are being shaped and then materialised in everyday life remain scarce, in particular in the non-Western context. As Fox (2016:2) suggests: ‘We have some good leads for where to search for this tacit nationalism, but we haven’t yet uncovered evidence of it’. While trying to understand why we are still facing such a lack of evidence he emphasises the invisible,

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untouchable quality of everyday nationalism. In particular, it is the capacity of not attracting attention that distinguishes everyday nationalism from other forms (see also Edensor 2006:529). In other words, Fox contends that nationalism ‘works its magic not through flag waving, but through flags hanging limply, stealthily concocting a world of nations unselfconsciously and uncritically imbibed as part of the taken for granted order of things. These limp flags are not a metaphor for the nation’s impotency, but for its potency’ (Fox 2016:2).

Limp Flags and Noisy Invisible Identities (Post-Socialism and the Everyday) In their provocative book Captain Swing, Hobsbawm and Rude ([1969] 2014) made a claim that people tend not to ‘notice’ phenomena until they make the headlines (see also Billig 1995; Fox 2016; Jenkins 2011). And this applies too to how research in certain areas becomes modish over time. Since the rise of Putin, research on authoritarian and neo-conservative identities has increased – an elite project, but not necessarily reflected so unambiguously in everyday expressions of identity. The same can be said for research on the Middle East after the Arab Spring or research on Ukraine after the Orange Revolution. Now, where have scholars found inspiration to expand their research, or move their focus, to a new region or topic? Most likely in newspapers, news programmes and media outlets. It could be said, thus, that (some) scholars tend not to notice a phenomenon until it hits the headlines. Indifference and apathy, more difficult to measure than active promotion of national values, or other manifested expressions of nationalism, have recently gained attention (Carter et al. 2011). This, in some respects, is connected to the concept of power or simply the decision not to do anything about a given situation, or against a given political regime (Sharp 1973, 1991). It can help better understand the existence of an ‘implicit nationalism’ (Hassin and Fergusson 2007; Hassin et al. 2009; Carter et al. 2011). Scholars have recently afforded more importance to ‘. . . the mundane practices through which something which we label “the state” becomes present in everyday life . . . this intense involvement of the state in so many of the most ordinary aspects of social life as the prosaic aspect of the state’ (Painter 2006:753). This reflects the end of a time-frame for a

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nation-building project and process. The elites can propose a framework but the nation is ultimately reproduced and renegotiated by the people on an everyday basis. As Connor (2004) argued, there is no defined temporal framework for the construction of a nation (Connor 2004). Because we may know when nation-building starts but not necessarily when it is completed, we can see it as a project that inscribes a process, rather than a phenomenon (Isaacs and Polese 2015). If this has to be elaborated it must also be informed by the agency of people. A project is conceived within a given framework and most likely by political elites, while the process remains ongoing and other actors may participate in it, being equally important to its outcomes. The ‘people’ dimension has been only recently acknowledged. Early works using the term ‘nation-building’ pointed to the agency of national elites and the role of state institutions and mechanisms in the construction of a national political community. This was seen as the best, or possibly sole, way to avoid conflicts in multi-ethnic states that emerged because of the decolonisation process. With borders artificially traced and several ethnic groups living under the roof of the same state, building the nation around a series of values was seen as the only way to deal with ethnic diversity (Deutsch and Foltz 1966), at least in theory since little seemed to change after that (Connor 1972). However, further debates on nation-building, discussing the construction of Western nation states and then the way nationalism and nation-building had been interpreted and pursued in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, show a similar origin. Further debates on the formation of national identities tended to shift the focus from the post-colonial world to the European experience, looking at the ways some nation states had emerged, thus contributing to the diversity of views about when nations were born (Gellner 1983, 1991), what the ancestor of a nation was and what the main milestones in their transformation into modern states were, as well as constructivist vs perennialist and primordialist debates (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1990). The collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia offered a tremendous opportunity to scholars interested in national identity. The collapse of three major federations (Czechoslovakia, the USSR and Yugoslavia) generated a variety of successor states offering new material and cases to continue empirical studies on national identity, which informed the third wave of nation-building literature.

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Table I.1 Four Waves of Nation-building Studies and Four Different Interpretations in Scholarly Debates Period

Geographical Focus

Conceptualisation

1960s

New states of Asia and Modernity will erase ethnic Africa boundaries and civic values will prevent conflicts End of the 1970s, Western Europe and Desire to create even access to beginning of the US resources and economic welfare 1980s leads to conception of the contemporary nation state 1990s Former USSR and Ethnic boundaries are dangerous. Balkans Engagement with civic values will allow consolidation of political community After 2001 Post-conflict countries If a state is unable to take care of (such as Afghanistan or itself, foreign powers must have a Iraq) primary role in promoting democracy Source: Polese 2011.

Recently, nation-building literature has diverged even further. Starting from Fukuyama’s book Nation-building from Afghanistan to Iraq, it has moved from the idea of a nation, re-framing discussion into an international relations context (with a debatable use of the ‘worldnation’, see Connor 1967), leading ‘nation-building’ to signify the intervention of foreign powers to stabilise an unstable state. What these debates have in common is the tendency to emphasise the role of elites, of a national narrative constructed at the top level. This is possibly the most visible aspect of national identity formation and we would agree that it is an important one. A state is there to give instructions to its citizens and most policy making originates at the state level, this feeding a large body of scholarship on nation-building in former socialist countries (Brubaker 1994; Kolstø 2000; Roy 2007; Smith 1998). However useful to understand the starting point of nation-building at the country level, this approach is limited. First, it assumes that once a policy is adopted it will roll all the way down to the citizens and produce some effects with little distortion between the initial intentions of the

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policy makers and its outcomes. Critical research has shown that this is not always the case (Mylonas 2013). A state, comprising a number of large organisations, is not monolithical but reproduced and enacted through a set of practices and interactions between people and their institutions (Desbiens et al. 2004; Jones 2007; Kasza 2002, Polese et al. 2014), in the words of the former head of UNAIDS: when I visited a Catholic hospital in Namibia . . . I asked ‘Sister, are you promoting condoms?’ Her answer was short: ‘Doctor Piot, Rome is a long way from Namibia’ . . . It made me understand that even a religion with a hierarchical structure as apparently rigid as the Roman Catholic Church’s is not in reality monolithic, but guided in its daily work by the variable styles of individual humans (Piot 2010:268) Orders, instructions, even ideological commitments can get lost on their way and produce a different, milder or distorted message and outcome. Verdery framed Romania as the Kingdom of Oz to point out the relevance of this to the socialist period (1991). Scott (1998) demonstrated that grand projects and ideas intended to improve human conditions may fail specifically due to this transmission issue. This brings us to a second, but interconnected, point. People are not passive actors (who could be called ‘policy-takers’ as opposed to policymakers) but interpret, negotiate or even oppose political measures, either formally or informally. This is something that has informed several sociological works looking at the relationship between people and society (Giddens 1984; Migdal 2001) and can be applied to the study of national identity (Polese 2010, 2011). Inasmuch as people are not passive actors subject to policies but rather select them, prioritise some (not necessarily the ones the elites would like them to prioritise) and contribute to their interpretation and renegotiation of their symbolic value, we have to take into account the role of ordinary people and their agency; the everyday is a useful way to do this. In the language of a state, the state then ‘interacts with’, ‘intervenes in’, ‘depends upon’ or ‘regulates’ other distinct social spheres such as ‘the economy’, ‘civil society’, ‘private life’ and so on. Focusing on the statization of the everyday

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is one way to undermine the separate spheres assumption by disrupting the binary logic of state/non-state formulations (Painter 2006:754) Indeed, a growing number of studies confirm the importance of the unselfconscious form of nation, located, but at the same time concealed, in the mundane contexts, practices and rhythms of everyday life (Antonsich 2015; Edensor 2002, 2006; Lo¨fgren 1989, 1993; Eley and Suny 1996; Skey 2011; Foster 2002). In the former socialist region, this logic has fast emerged through the works of a relatively small group of scholars that have concentrated on everyday understandings of such concepts as nation, citizenship and ethnicity (Agarin 2011; Brubaker 2006; Cheskin 2013; Klumbyte 2010; Knott 2015; Kulyk 2014; Pfoser 2014; Pawłusz 2016; Seliverstova 2016). They have shown that place-based identities at the level of ordinary people are extremely nuanced concepts and processes. Though people tend to perceive their national, ethnic identities as taken-for-granted, they interpret and experience them differently. Some of these authors revealed that very often people do not differentiate between ethnic and national and that for them nationality, ethnicity and citizenship are relational and situational states of mind. This recent body of literature, mainly using rich in-depth ethnographic studies, has demonstrated that national or ethnic identity needs to be rather understood from the perspectives of actors who experience it and make meaning of it and not only from an institutional perspective. In addition, other attempts have been made to promote debates on the contesting and renegotiation of state ideas on national communities. A special issue of Nationalities Papers (Isaacs and Polese 2015) has used a specific focus on Central Asia to emphasise the gap between how nation-building is imagined by the national elites and how this comes about in different ways, highlighting the gap between intentions and results. In a subsequent volume, the same authors make the claim that traditional tools and approaches are not sufficient to understand the variety of practices that construct the nation through actions and modes which are not always or necessarily initiated by the political elites. Development of the cinema industry in Kazakhstan (Isaacs 2015), organisation of mega events in Azerbaijan (Millitz 2015)

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as well as the role of other actors in their everyday work (Ventsel 2012, 2016; Wigglesworth-Baker 2016) shed light on a practice that has been defined as ‘spontaneous nation-building’ (Polese 2009, 2009b, 2011) and that can be explained as a construction of national identity conceived, performed, and engaged with by people or organizations of people; for instance, the construction of national identity through the perpetuation of national songs, popular art, singing, and dancing despite the possible lack of support from state authorities . . . second, just as nation-building measures might not have the desired effects and impact on a given population, there might be some measures that, conceived of at the central level, were not intended to primarily influence identity construction but nevertheless end up strongly affecting identity in a country (Polese and Horak 2015:2) Inspired by these approaches we have attempted to bring the debate a step forward and engage with practices that draw on Eriksen’s distinction between formal and informal nationalism, where the identity presented by the formal institutions of the state does not fit with the experiences of the people to whom it is directed: the ideology does not, in these respects, communicate with the experienced needs and aspirations of part of the population, and its symbolism is therefore not credible and is ultimately impotent (Eriksen 1993:6) We are thus interested in the experience and reproduction of identity by ordinary people in their daily interactions with the state, its institutions and other individuals. We look, in particular, at the way the nation is produced in the imaginations of these citizens through a myriad of actions that they perform, sometimes unconsciously. We maintain that these actions are crucial to the formation of a national consciousness and studying these actions is vital to understand the very essence of national identity, which is the result of a synergy, or a synthesis, between what the elites propose through official narratives and what people understand, renegotiate and reproduce.

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This Book’s Approach There seems to be a consensus among scholars focusing on the everyday, that the very concept of everyday is not easily accessible (see also Edensor 2006; Skey 2009:334; Billig 1995:38; Eley and Suny 1996:21–2; Hearn 2007:658–9). This is based on the understanding that national, and, in general, identities, are shaped by what we do not do, as much as by what we do. It is not what I consume that defines my identity but also what I choose not to consume. Still, surveys usually explore the few things that people do, rather than concentrate on the million things that people choose, consciously or unconsciously, not to do. And even among the things that people do not do, some have more importance than others and the choice to attach a certain importance to one thing and not to another is highly subjective, becoming visible only when the analysis is made ‘thick’ as defined by Clifford Geertz (1973), when we isolate a choice to study the context and background behind that very particular choice. This makes the everyday a slippery territory, hostile to most data collection techniques that are not sufficiently deep. Ethnography is somehow too time consuming and more difficult to frame in a positivist analysis and therefore is not usually used to gather evidence for political or economic decisions. However, attention to qualitative methods has increased recently and a number of analyses make extensive use of qualitative approaches with the end of providing a multidimensional view on social phenomena. Figures and numbers count and need to be collected. But the capacity to read these figures beyond their apparent meaning is an important asset that is acknowledged as lacking in some current research, the 2016 US election forecasts being the ultimate evidence for it. It would be unfair to claim that the everyday has been totally absent from post-socialist research. Immediately after the opening of the socialist bloc and thus the possibility to spend periods of time in a country to talk to people and observe them, anthropologists and sociologists started inquiring into everyday practices and material culture. They looked at ordinary people with the goal of understanding the post-socialist transition from the people’s perspective. Seminal works by Boym (2002), Rausing (2004), Wanner (1998), Humphrey (2002), Caldwell (2002) and Verdery (2003), focused on difficulties that former Soviet and socialist citizens were facing in the beginning of 1990s while

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coping with poverty, ideological changes and loss of their previous identity references. Although national identity was not necessarily their primary focus, a number of scholars produced meaningful accounts of the development of new markers for group identities, evolving in that particular part of the world. With their ethnographic work they uncovered details on informal economic practices (Humphrey 2002), in which many post-Soviet people were engaged. Also they demonstrated how people were transforming from Soviet to Western consumers (Fehervary 2002; Rausing 2004; Pilkington 2002). Overall, such works have contributed to understanding upon which values and elements new national communities were based. However, the micro-processes they researched were rarely connected to or confronted macro-process, such as nation and statebuilding. A significant amount of solidly written accounts on nation-building in the region have adopted a state-centric perspective (Kolsto 1999, 2000; Kuzio 1998, 2002; Smith 1998; Tolz 1998; Vetik 2012) while exploring the issues of minorities, diaspora populations and border regions. They usually focus on such aspects as integration, assimilation or potential ethnic tensions within one national community. However, few works credit groups with a role of challenging official discourses on nationhood and citizenship. In our book, ethnic minorities and populations living in the border regions are empirically presented as symbolic spaces of mediation, fracture and contestation of top-down policies. Formal actors of nation-building (the state, its institutions, political elites), providing instructions through formal and official channels, are not alone in this task. There are unrecognised, unnoticed and non-formalised actors that act in a way that is informal or spontaneous, to redefine national identity more ambiguously. In contrast to most works on identity construction that examine the politics and policies of identity-building in the region, our narrative takes into account the role of non-traditional, non-politicised and nonelite actors in the construction of identity. For one thing, even small children, as school pupils, can play an important role in renegotiation of state ideas about nation and its citizens, by adding their own interpretations or by not accepting some taken-for-granted assumptions. In addition, we emphasise the transnational nature of a variety of practices that can be found in more than one country. By doing this, we go beyond an understanding of national identity construction limited to

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a single-state territory to study movements, tendencies and attitudes that have emerged over a region, or a number of countries. We look at the way identity, or identities, are conceived, understood and ultimately performed by actors independent and disconnected from the state. We refer here to the use of consumption practices and patterns to redefine the nation and its boundaries, to cross-country tendencies that unite ethnic groups, classes or segments of a society ‘beyond the nation’ and create contrasting, or competing, identity markers then used by a variety of actors and single citizens, to redefine their identity. In particular, we look at the way identity is understood, performed and reproduced by common actions in the everyday life of the concerned actors. We do all this to propose that negotiation of identity interacts and goes beyond official discourses produced by political elites within a single territorially bound space and place, so to explore the nexus between symbolic and physical spaces, private and public spheres, tangible and intangible, formal and informal. We maintain that a main deficiency of social science research that we set out to address has been the neglect of phenomena that we call ‘invisible’ (see Becker 1963; Fox 2016; also Pawłusz and Polese 2017; Polese 2016 for a direct reference to the invisible).

Structure of the Book and Main Themes The current book was conceived and elaborated to engage with three distinct aspects that have been relatively neglected: educational institutions as contested spaces, the role of media in reshaping the national imaginary and the everyday construction of identity through cultural practices. We have been lucky in this respect to secure authors who provided us with a variety of interesting case studies. The three parts taken together provide, at least in our view, a good overview of what identity is and how it is changing in the post-socialist region. Because of this and the usual word limitation we had, we have felt the need to give the authors the maximum possible space. This has been at the root of our choice not to contribute a chapter as editors. Our views are expressed in this Introduction and we have conceived this book as a dialogue between scholars, generations and views. By force of this and for the sake of academic debates, we have been happy to include authors’

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ideas with which we do not necessarily fully agree, but believe can help feed a dialogue on the issue and provoke further authors to engage with it. The first part of this book provides evidence of the often-neglected role of educational institutions as platforms for renegotiation and contestation of state ideas on national categories. The first chapter, by Dilyara Suleymanova, analyses the role of schools in a multi-ethnic environment, offering the case of Tatarstan. She views schools as both agents of the state and scenes/platforms for ordinary people on which they can express their national sentiments, but also where they can act as creators of some alternative accounts of nation while challenging the official ones. The main message of this work is that people, even very young ones, are not passive receptors and their agency in the nationbuilding process is important to consider for understanding the ways in which national identity is shaped (see also Knott 2015; Thompson 2002). In the following chapter, Tamara Trosˇt sheds light on school subjects not often considered as classical channels for transmission of ideas on nation. Investigating the invisible side of the nationformation process, she demonstrates how such subjects as geography or even sport can transmit messages about national categories in Serbia and Croatia. When examining primary school textbooks she notes subtle messages on nation there, which are however less ethnocentric than official ideas on nation presented in history textbooks within the same educational system. The first part concludes with a chapter by A´gnes Patakfalvi-Czirja´k and Csaba Zahora´n, who first identify some failures in the institutional framework for national identity in Moldova and then demonstrate how ordinary people cope with the projection of Moldovan national community produced by local political elites. The authors reveal how ordinary people make sense of ideas on national and ethnic categories and how they fill the gaps they find in official narrative. Borders are presented here as physical places to observe the mundane renegotiation of ideas on national identity in Moldova, across which daily different cultures, ethnicities and languages intermix. The second part of the book consists of three chapters that explore the role of media in shaping and portraying national community. Marharyta Fabrykant analyses commercial advertisements in Russia and Belarus to reveal which ideas of nation local businesses use when addressing their

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consumers. The results of her study show that businesses rely mainly on state ideas of nation and do not take into account non-conventional, nongovernment opinions. This leads her to suggest that advertisements are another channel of state propaganda and not a reflection of everyday understanding of nation, shared by ordinary people. Elizaveta Gaufman’s chapter concludes the second part. Following some similar concerns of the previous chapter, she analyses the discourses of Russian social networks. However, she presents such discourses as a response to the state’s foreign policy. Her chapter reflects on an existing, though rarely highlighted, dialogue between citizens and the state. Gaufman focuses on people’s reactions to Russia’s foreign policy. She maintains that, whilst supporting it, people incorporate new elements of Russian folklore in which the main characters are usually important geopolitical figures. Gaufman argues that the creation of a geopolitical enemy, against which the current version of national identity in Russia is built, occurs not only at the level of political elite and transmitted through various channels as propaganda. The idea of enemy is developed further by ordinary people and social networks serve as a platform to do that. Gaufman speaks also about the generation of new national images which then serve as references for collective national identification. The third part of the book illustrates everyday cultural practices through which national identity is formed. The first chapter by Petra Sˇtˇ’astna´ presents an interesting case study on a music genre – turbofolk – that developed in the former Yugoslav countries. Turbofolk, which is a combination of pop and folk music, is symbolically rich in references to both the socialist past and capitalist future, nostalgia for the East and expectation of the West. Moreover, it has been always supported by local political elites and widely shared outside of former Yugoslavia amongst members of the Yugoslav diaspora. Such features give turbofolk a symbolic power to unite people and to inspire a sense of collective belonging among them. The next work in this section explores the role of food in the formation of identity. In particular, Raina Gavrylova’s chapter focuses on the production of cultural identity in the hospitality industry of Bulgaria. By questioning the standards of national cuisine used by local hospitality businesses she looks at the way Bulgarian national cuisine is shaped and how this affects its consumers, in particular their perception of ‘national’. The chapter illustrates a dynamic

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process of renegotiation of national cuisine to contend that ‘Bulgarian’ entails a mix of traditions from different times and cultures of other countries. This redefinition, in turn, opens up an individual’s contribution into the shaping of what is national. As a result, Gavrylova argues, in contrast to a rather fixed state and popular nationalistic rhetoric, this type of national cuisine, developed by local caterers, is more inclusive and flexible, as it incorporates elements and names from cuisines of other cultures (including Turkish) that are organically accepted as ‘Bulgarian’. The final chapter, by Timofey Agarin and Lı¯ga Rudzı¯te, takes the reader to (not-so) faraway Mongolia, a country that, in spite of being closer to the USSR than other neighbouring countries, has been largely absent from post-socialist debates. Here the authors contrast the state’s projection of Mongolian national identity, in which men have a central role, to a popular understanding of what being Mongolian means. By doing this, the authors suggest that women also play an important, if not leading, role in the construction of a national identity. The reasoning for such a conclusion lies in the fact that men are constrained in their attitudes – their role is already predefined by state-supported narratives in which men are portrayed as successors of Genghis Khan (referred to in Mongolian as Chenggis Khaan). Women, in contrast, are freer in their choices and can adapt better to the conditions of modern society, thus usually carving out for themselves new roles in Mongolian society. Taken together these chapters argue that informal nation-building sites (from consumption to art, music to media), usually considered part of the domain of everyday life, create national discourses that often intertwine with other (regional, global) social identity discourses and influence the way ordinary citizens imagine their group belonging. The analysis of discourses in social networks groups, as well as in local advertisements, shows that while some state-led ideas on nation are echoed and even dramatised, others can be contested and in the end generate new images and markers of the nation. Furthermore, nationbuilding is hardly merely a discursive process. The nation and its representations become materialised through objects, as well as the arrangement of physical, ‘tangible’ spaces, be it a restaurant providing national cuisine or a shop with ‘authentic’ local products. Accordingly, when people visit such spaces or buy such services and products, they are repeatedly exposed to the silent message that the world consists of

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nations and nationhood is a basic category of placing oneself, others, but also spaces and objects, within this world. Finally, beyond discursive and material reminders of nationhood, the nation is also a category of practice and performance. Serving ‘typical food’ of the country to guests or listening to nationally themed music and attending concerts and parties where it is played are only a few examples of the myriad ways people, consciously and unconsciously, practice their identity. The gravity of the informal and the everyday for national identity-formation lies thus in the fact that they are almost never perceived as political by ordinary people. While they are seemingly silent, implicit and invisible sites of nation-building, this book demonstrates the everyday as just as politically noisy in its accumulation of national identity markers upon which ‘hot’ forms of nationhood and other mobilisations rest.

CHAPTER 1 `

I'M ONLY HALF!' SCHOOLING AND STRATEGIES OF BELONGING AMONG ADOLESCENTS FROM MINORITY ETHNIC BACKGROUNDS IN RUSSIA Dilyara Suleymanova

Introduction School education is considered central to the processes of state-building and formation of national identity (Weber 1976; Boli, Ramirez and Meyer 1985; Reed-Danahay 1996). Through the state-wide network of public schools, reaching to the most distant places, education disseminates and transmits official ideology across territories and populations. Schools promote universal literacy, knowledge of official languages and common communication codes, fostering the processes of cultural homogenisation (Gellner 1983). Moreover, they are institutional sites where nationhood is imagined, emotionally experienced and reproduced (Coe 2005; Be´ne´ı¨ 2008; Adely 2012). Mostly, however, our understandings of schooling are based on studies that rely on the analysis of top-down educational policies, official documents and textbooks, which convey only a partial picture of the educational processes. It is crucially important to see how these educational discourses,

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practices and policies are implemented, received, re-negotiated and possibly subverted in concrete school settings. As this volume sets out to study nationhood from the everyday life perspective, attending to lived experiences of the nation (Fox and MillerIdriss 2008; Isaacs & Polese 2016), this chapter explores how national/ ethnic identities are perceived, constructed and negotiated within the social spaces of school. It is anchored in ethnographically informed research that approaches national identity as a set of everyday practices, whether performance, consumption, material culture, music or arts (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008; Pawłusz and Seliverstova 2016). Research into post-Soviet nation-building processes, as Isaacs and Polese (2016) have pointed out, have been based mostly on studies of political ideologies and elite discourses at the expense of more grounded approaches. This is also true for research on identity politics in the context of education, as there are still few studies that engage with schooling from an anthropological, ethnographic standpoint. While the analysis of textbooks, educational materials and policies reveal political, ideological and bureaucratic aspects of nation-building through schooling, the exploration of the social world of classrooms opens up the possibility of studying the everyday ‘strategies of belonging’ – the ways adolescents understand, deal with and instrumentalise identity categories that are ascribed to them by the school and adults in general. This is an especially interesting undertaking in the context of postSoviet educational systems, where ethnicity is inscribed into the school’s bureaucratic procedures and projected as a primordial, in-born characteristic of an individual. In contrast to such static and objectified understandings of ethnic belonging emanating from state institutions, everyday strategies of belonging by adolescents reveal the interactional and situational qualities of identity. In this contribution I will thus address and explore the multi-faceted processes of identity negotiation among school adolescents (14 –16 years old) as they take place in multi-ethnic classrooms in a small town in the Republic of Tatarstan, an autonomous region of the Russian Federation. Drawing on ethnographic data from an anthropological study of schooling in Tatarstan, Russia, I will present vignettes illustrating the divergence between the institutional procedures of identity ascription and interactional dynamics of identity negotiation at school. The in-depth portraits of selected pupils from Mari and Udmurt ethnic

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backgrounds illustrate how adolescents seek recognition, status and a sense of social adequacy in the social spaces of school, how they deal with ethnic ascriptions that are stigmatised both in official educational discourses and local societal discourses. The dominant societal and public discourses in Russia that mostly define minority identities through folkloristic images of the village ways of life, frozen in their backwardness, play an important role in the ways students perceive their ethnic belonging and that of others. In the classroom youth strategically renegotiate and redefine their sense of belonging as well as resist hegemonic ways of talking about ethnicity. Numerous ethnographic studies of schooling have demonstrated how daily lives of adolescents at school are shaped by different strategies to gain status and friendships and acquire a sense of social adequacy (Willis 1981; Foley 1990; Levinson 1996; Hall 2008; Adely 2012). Adolescents and children devise various strategies in dealing with ascribed categories and demonstrate various responses which attest to the active role played by children in co-constructing their identities (Semons 1991; Bailey 2000; Barley 2013). Particularly within school settings, children and adolescents are often confronted with the various expressions of racism and ethnocentrism (Hirschfeld 1998; Ogbu 2008). It is often from their classmates and peers that children learn not only that people can be divided into categories but also that there are ‘bad’ and ‘good’ ethnic categories. School thus is one of the most important social spaces where ethnic categorisation and labelling is acted out (Semons 1991; Hammersley and Woods 1993; Barley 2013). Some of these studies have used Goffman’s (1959) theory of dramaturgical analysis to interpret the processes of identity performance and negotiation among children and adolescents (Hall 2008; Barley 2013). The strategies that teenagers employ in relation to belonging can be interpreted within the framework of ‘impression management’ as navigation between the ‘front stage’ with its publicly articulated identity and the backstage with identities reserved for private spheres. Although this approach has its limitations, it can be fruitful to look at these processes through the interactional and performative angle, especially when it comes to dealing with ethnic ascriptions that are stigmatised (Eidheim 1969). In the following section I first introduce the reader to some of the complexities of post-Soviet education in Russia where schools, especially

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in the autonomous regions like Tatarstan, have become an arena of competing projects of ethnic (and/or regional) and state-centred (national) belonging. I then introduce the Republic of Tatarstan and the small town where ethnographic fieldwork was conducted. Second, I present the school settings where ethnographic observations took place and introduce two vignettes that illustrate the discrepancies between the institutional and interactional dynamics of ethnic ascription. In the third part, I present the portraits of selected pupils from the Mari and Udmurt ethnic backgrounds and their strategies of dealing with ethnic stigma as well as with the ethnicising discourses of school and larger surroundings. I conclude with interpretation and analysis of these vignettes, drawing on but also challenging some of the Goffman assumptions. Finally, I reflect on the problems of essentialism and dilemmas of cultural authenticity that remain central to the projects of cultural revitalisation among ethnic minorities in Russia today, many of which struggle with stigmatising discourses.

Schooling in Post-Soviet Russia as an Arena of Competing Nationhood Claims With its centrally devised and uniform official curriculum and centrally produced textbooks, the Soviet Union, and to some extent post-Soviet Russia, are both examples of highly centralised and unified education systems (Webber 1999; Eklof, Holmes and Kaplan 2005). Schools in the Soviet Union were seen as being responsible for the manufacturing a loyal Soviet citizen, spreading literacy in the Russian language and transmitting the ideological messages of socialism. Certain concessions were made to ethnic minorities within this highly centralised education system, such as establishing schools that instructed in minority languages (Anderson and Silver 1984). After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian educationalists launched a series of reforms aimed at democratisation, diversification and regionalisation of education (Webber 1999; Eklof, Holmes and Kaplan 2005; Karpov and Lisovskaya 2005; Suleymanova 2017). With the educational reforms following political centralisation in Russia after 2000, these projects have been replaced with consolidated efforts at inculcating national and patriotic sentiments centred on Russia as a nation state (Piattoeva 2009; Prina 2015; Suleymanova 2017).

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While numerous studies have analysed Russian educational policies in the post-Soviet years from the state perspective (Jones 1994; Webber 1999; Eklof, Holmes and Kaplan 2005; Karpov and Lisovskaya 2005; Shnirelman 2006), there are still few works that derive their analysis from ethnographic research in concrete Russian schools (Markowitz 2000; Bloch 2003; Alvarez Veinguer 2007; Suleymanova 2015). This has partially to do with the difficulties of obtaining access to ethnographic research at schools in Russia, as many principals or educational officials are unwilling to let researchers, let alone foreign ones, enter and stay for periods of time at school. The Republic of Tatarstan is taken as a case study to explore the interrelationship between schooling and the politics of identity (understood from both macro and micro perspective) in the context of post-Soviet transformations in Russia. Tatarstan is a particularly interesting case to explore such kinds of issues as it is an ethnically heterogeneous region (one of 21 ethnically based republics in Russia) which acquired extensive autonomy in the early post-Soviet years and which has introduced important initiatives in school education and language planning (Graney 1999, 2010; Gorenburg 2003).1 Besides Tatars and Russians as the most numerous ethnic groups in the republic, there are ethnic minorities such as Udmurt, Mari, Chuvash and Mordva that live compactly in various areas of the republic and are considered autochthonous to the area of the Volga-Ural basin.2 The Umdurt, Mari and Mordva have corresponding ‘ethnic’ republics in the Volga-Ural region and are often collectively referred to as Finno-Ugrians in academic and public discourse (Lallukka 2001).3 School education in Tatarstan has been a site of competing nationhood projects throughout the post-Soviet years, with federal and regional (republican) governments advancing claims over the educational content to be transmitted in schools (Graney 1999; Suleymanova 2017). Official Russian school curriculum and textbooks do not give much attention to the ethnic diversity of the country (Khasanova 2005; Maier 2005; Schnirelman 2011). History textbooks scarcely cover the history of the incorporation of various ethnic groups into the Russian state and largely ignore the diversity of their historic experiences within the country (Khasanova 2005; Shnirelman 2011; Ismailov and Ganieva 2013). During the early post-Soviet years, Tatarstan implemented various ‘ethno-regional’ initiatives to strengthen

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the role of school in maintaining and developing the Tatar language and in cultivating minority ethnic identities and cultures (Graney 1999; Faller 2000; Wertheim 2003; Gorenburg 2005; Alvarez Veinguer 2007; Wigglesworth-Baker 2016). These included not only diversification of curricula and extra-curricular activities in the conventional Russianlanguage schools (that constitute absolute majority of schools in Tatarstan) to account more for the ethnic diversity of the area, but also expanding and supporting the network of minority language schools (that teach in Tatar, Udmurt, Mari, etc., languages). The idea was to create spaces within school that would better reflect the diversity of identities, cultures and histories of particular regions and provide resources for resisting cultural homogenisation and centralisation. However, with the changing political and social constellations in Russia in the early 2000s, such initiatives were regarded as a threat to the integrity of Russian statehood and to national unity, so gradually they have been dismantled through a series of educational reforms (Zamyatin 2012; Prina 2015; Suleymanova 2017). With the introduction of the new education standards (2010) and of the Unified State Examination (2009), the ethno-regional component has been removed from the curriculum, thus leaving almost no space in the classroom for representations and narratives of minority or regional identities.4 The schools of the provincial town5 where I conducted my field research have also experienced the consequences of these reforms. The town is situated in a predominantly rural district of Tatarstan and is populated mostly by Tatars (around 80 per cent) but has a significant number of other ethnic groups, foremost Udmurts, Russians and a small percentage of Mari and Kriashen.6 Situated in provincial areas, far from the centres of policy making, small-town schools are no less subject to bureaucratic control (by regular school checks) than city schools. What is special about the small-town schools is that they are firmly embedded in the social fabric of their surroundings; teachers, parents and students are connected not only through school but also through kinship and neighbourhood ties. The countryside surrounding this town has Udmurt and Mari villages, in some of which there are primary schools that partially use native language (Udmurt and Mari) in teaching and also implement some programs of Udmurt/Mari ethno-cultural education. Most town schools however instruct in the Russian language, even though the

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student body is predominantly Tatar. With the introduction of the Unified State Examination in the 2009 – 10 academic year, all schools more or less reoriented towards effective preparation of their pupils for this test, so certain standardisation of priorities and stronger emphasis on Russian-language teaching was a visible tendency (Chevalier 2013; Suleymanova 2017). The research on which this chapter is based was conducted in 2009 – 13 and included an extended ethnographic fieldwork in two town schools in the 2009 – 10 academic year. This fieldwork involved participant observation during lessons, breaks, at various school events and extra-curricular activities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with school principals, teachers as well as students in the Russian and Tatar languages. In each school I chose two classes, which I followed regularly, visiting their lessons and conducting formal interviews with pupils and teachers as well as more informal conversations in the flow of school life and also outside of school. Hanging out with students after school or in the evenings was an important part of the fieldwork, not confined only to school settings but involving various social spaces. I also occasionally visited schools in the countryside (in the Mari, Udmurt, Kriashen and Tatar villages). In Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, interviews were conducted with educational experts and functionaries. Analysis of selected textbooks on history and social sciences as well as of educational materials and policy documents with a particular focus on representation of ethnic diversity and regionalism were essential to this research.7 The data for this chapter was mostly taken from the observations in the town’s Russian-language school, which had an ethnically mixed body of students.

School Practices of Ethnic Ascription Shortly after arrival to this small provincial town, I realised how proud and conscious people were of the ethnic diversity of the area and peaceful co-existence of various ethnic groups on its territory. Multi-ethnic composition and peaceful inter-ethnic co-existence were hallmarks of the district, especially praised by the local administration that regularly organised public folkloristic celebrations of ethnic festivities (Russian, Tatar, Udmurt and Mari). They also constantly referred to the

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inter-ethnic harmony of the district in their public speeches. These ways of talking about inter-ethnic relations have strong links with the Soviet discourse of ‘internationalism’ and the typical language of the Soviet nomenclature when they talked about ethnic diversity. Local residents themselves also frequently referred to inter-ethnic harmony, underlining how friendly (druzhno) they lived with their neighbours or friends of other ethnicity, helping and visiting each other or jointly celebrating national holidays. Indeed, my initial observations were that ethnicity was not the main concern of children and youth and mixed friendships were the norm and not seen as problematic. However, after some time in the field, it became obvious that even if overshadowed by the rhetoric of ‘peacefully living together’, ethnic stereotyping and prejudicing about the ‘other’ were widespread. People were quite conscious about ethnic origins and it did play a role in certain life situations and kinds of interactions. Also public state institutions, such as schools, regard ethnicity as an important characteristic of the students, collecting information on the ethnicity of pupils and handing it over to the educational ministry (of Tatarstan). As Rogers Brubaker has prominently argued, the Soviet Union established a system of ‘institutionalised’ ethnicity where ethnic identity became a ‘fundamental social category sharply distinct from the overarching categories of statehood and citizenship’ (Brubaker 1996).8 Every citizen in the Soviet Union had to indicate his/her ethnicity in their internal passport (from the list of ‘official nationalities’), in personal forms when taking up a job or enrolling to an educational institution, as well as during census-taking (Simonsen 1999). In Russian schools, up until the end of 1990s, information on ethnicity (nationalnost’) of pupils was contained in the school register. As a part of post-Soviet measures to dismantle this system of institutionalised ethnicity, the new Russian passports issued in 1997 did not contain the so-called ‘fifth’ line on ethnic identity (Simonsen 1999). Likewise, new school registers have been issued without the column on ethnicity. Despite these changes, ethnicity remained the fundamental category of social identification and various state agencies, including schools, continue to record and gather information on ethnicity of their students. In Tatarstan, the republic’s Ministry of Education collects information on ethnic composition of schools, as they explain, in order to obtain necessary information for devising policies on native-language education and language teaching.

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How does a school gather information on ethnicity? Observations in my field site provide some insights into that process. Usually, at the beginning of the academic year, teachers either ask parents to fill in forms, which contain information on ethnicity, or fill in these forms themselves, based on birth certificates (which usually contain the indication of ethnicity of both parents). Thus, teachers ascribe ethnic identity to pupils based on what they see as ‘objective’ criteria – information provided by parents or by the documents that indicate ethnicity of both parents (from which teachers automatically derive the ethnicity of their children). The situation gets more complicated when a child is from a mixed family. When teachers have to decide ethnicity based on birth certificates, they have either to take the mother’s or father’s ethnicity. According to my conversations with teachers, this was rather arbitrary. In the last five years teachers said they would take the ethnicity of the father, while earlier ethnicity of the mother was crucial. In case parents indicated the ethnicity directly, it was up to them to decide what ethnicity he/she wished his/her child to be registered with. In this institutional logic of identification, the child’s own view of his or her ethnic identity is not taken into account. However, there are exceptions to these institutional procedures. One of them I encountered in one of the classes of the Russian-language school, where the teacher received a newly composed ninth-grade class and let the students fill in their personal forms themselves. As I talked to her about the ethnic composition of her class, she explained: ‘If we gathered information on ethnicity from the parents and not from them (pupils), we would have a different ethnic composition in the class. We would have only two ethnic Russians instead of five that we have now’. As the teacher explained, this mismatch between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ indications of ethnicity had to do with the fact that children from Udmurt and Mari backgrounds in her class preferred to indicate their ethnicity as Russian. The teacher explained that pupils of these backgrounds were ashamed of their ethnic origins. She also pointed out that because most of them did not speak or did not want to speak their native language, they were basically ‘Russified’. The following episode from a classroom interaction further indicates how certain ethnic categories are perceived by students and gives insights into the interactional dynamics of identification. I had been

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attending a lesson of the Tatar language in a ninth-grade class and at the end of the lesson the teacher allowed me to make a small exchange with pupils. I asked children about their town, what they liked most about it and what they knew about different languages spoken in this area. I asked whether anyone spoke any Udmurt or Mari. The first reaction was silence. The silence was broken by one of the male students from the back rows, who pointed to a boy sitting in the front rows saying loudly: ‘He knows Mari, he is a Mari!’ The other boy seemed embarrassed, turned around and answered: ‘No, I am only half!’ Then, again the student from the back rows pointed to the other girl, saying: ‘And she, she is an Udmurt!’ The girl reacted to that with: ‘You! You are an Udmurt yourself!’ The boy answered: ‘No, I am half, my mother is Russian!’ As I asked children what they knew about the Russians, the same boy who was so active in distributing ethnic labels answered: ‘Russians are the best nationality!’ A Tatar boy who was sitting in the back rows intervened with: ‘And the Tatars too!’ (Field notes, Tatar language lesson, October 2009) What was apparent from this exchange is that ethnic categories were situated on a certain imaginative scale of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalities, with Russians being clearly identified as the best nationality, Tatars as a ‘good’ nationality and Udmurt and Mari ethnic categories ones to be embarrassed of. We continued our exchange on the topic of languages and it was clear that children from Mari or Udmurt backgrounds did not want to admit they knew or spoke their native languages. As I was showing interest in these ethnic communities and tried to ask them more about various festivities or cultural practices they knew, some of them would gradually be released from their embarrassment and would react positively to the fact that someone was interested in these cultures. Some students started to tell me that they knew or took part in some special Udmurt or Mari events or ceremonies.

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After the lesson, I talked to the teacher, asking her about children who declared they were mixed Russian-Udmurt or Russian-Mari backgrounds. She told me that these children in fact were not from mixed families but from ‘pure’ Mari or ‘pure’ Udmurt families. She said that many of them were embarrassed to admit that they were of Mari or Udmurt ethnicity and their strategy was to say that they were only ‘half’. But what do students actually learn about these ethnic groups at school? When one looks at what textbooks or other educational materials say about the ethnic communities collectively referred to as FinnoUgrians, one should admit that these groups are silenced in the educational discourse. Rarely are they mentioned in the textbooks at all.9 One of the Russian textbooks specifically designed to reflect the diversity of ethnic composition and histories of Russia’s population mentions Mari, Mordva and Chuvash (without mentioning the Udmurts at all) in a paragraph about the politics of Christianisation of the peoples of the Volga-Ural region,10 calling them ‘pagans’ and listing their names in brackets (Danilov and Kosulina 2004). In line with these discourses, one of the pupils told me that he read somewhere that Udmurts performed human sacrifices.11 In the local perceptions of the inhabitants of this area, Udmurts and Mari were also associated with ‘paganism’, suspicious rituals and sorcery. It was not rare to hear from the pupils that Udmurts use the evil eye and practice witchcraft and sorcery. Usually these views came together with stories of how one of their relatives had been bewitched by an Udmurt. Here we see how local ethnic prejudices intertwine with imperial and Soviet (through knowledge produced by Soviet ethnographers) constructions of Finno-Ugrians as ‘pagan’ communities, practicing sorcery and witchcraft.

Strategies of Belonging: Portraits of Pupils ‘I’m only half!’: passing as a Russian Closer portraits of some students reveal how young people deal with ethnic identities that are stigmatised. Dima is a 15-year-old teenager studying in the tenth grade of a Russian-language school. He is one of the most active boys in the class and often takes part in school-wide academic and sport competitions, concerts or military games. He is a volleyball player, has a belt in karate and is involved in the school’s military-patriotic club. He is the president of the school

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self-government and is often at the forefront of various social activities at school. He is thus an example of a ‘popular male’ who often engages in different kinds of school activities. I had a formal interview with Dima12 and several informal conversations throughout my research stay. During our interview I asked him about his ethnicity and he answered that he was Russian. As I asked him about his parents, he answered that: ‘I’m not sure about the parents. My mother is Russian. My father . . . I don’t know exactly, I didn’t study this; I’m not interested in this’. His surname gave a hint that his father was of either Mari or Udmurt ethnicity but the parents were divorced and Dima was living with his mother. When I asked him about the languages he knew, he only mentioned Russian, English and Tatar. Even though he clearly communicated his identity as Russian to his classmates, there were certain clues that allowed some of his peers to doubt this. When I talked to a classmate about the ethnic composition of the class, she told me that ‘even though Dima says he is Russian, I think he is neither Russian, nor Tatar. Probably a Mari or an Udmurt – I don’t know exactly’. When I asked why she thought he was not Russian, she told me his knowledge of the Tatar language was too good for a Russian. Another girl told me in a private conversation that Dima’s mother was Mari because her mother had befriended her. When I looked in the class records I saw that his ethnicity was indicated as Mari. This information was provided by his mother, who was indeed of Mari ethnicity, not Russian. His father, as it appeared later, was also of Mari ethnicity. In later conversations one of his best friends, who was of Udmurt background, revealed that Dima was actually from a pure Mari family. Thus, Dima was one of the examples of Mari and Udmurt children who presented their background as a mixed Russian even though both parents were Mari. Dima had the role of a ‘successful’ and ‘popular’ pupil within the circle of his classmates and his ethnic belonging as Mari might interfere negatively with this image. In order to bypass this stigma Dima was involved in what Goffman (1959) calls ‘impression management’: strategically re-negotiating identity depending on the particular social contexts. At the ‘front stage’, to use the Goffman’s metaphor, he was a Russian, active and popular at school. The presence of Mari ethnic markers, like name or religious affiliation, along with those of Russian ethnicity made this ‘passing’ almost unproblematic.13 The ‘backstage’

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was those spaces where his non-Russian background could be acknowledged, for example when visiting his relatives in the Mari countryside or with his closest friends, who would know about his ethnicity (one of them was of an Udmurt and another one of Kriashen background). That the ‘backstage’ identity still remains in certain ways important for the pupils is revealed in a conversation with another student who was of Udmurt ethnicity and, similarly to Dima, communicated his identity as Russian. While he acknowledged that Russian identity was close to him since he speaks Russian, he at the same time admitted that he felt close to Udmurts, especially when it came to religion. From time to time Sergey visits his relatives in the Udmurt countryside and especially his grandfather with whom he has a close relationship and who in a way socialised him into various Udmurt cultural practices (celebrating important life-cycle events and so on). Here he also hears Udmurt speech and understands it but prefers to speak in Russian with Udmurt youth in this countryside. While at school, Sergey clearly communicates his identity as Russian, in the Udmurt village it is his Udmurt membership that comes to the fore. Thus, strategically re-negotiating their identities against the backdrop of social discourses concerning ethnicity, this example demonstrates the interactional and strategic character that identity has for these students. In order to understand the strategies of belonging of these young people, we have to take into account that during the years of adolescence, peer circles become especially important and adolescents are to a great extent engaged in achieving status within their peer circles (Corsaro and Eder 1990; Hall 2008). Thus, if ethnic identity is in tension with the status role, ethnic belonging can be renounced or renegotiated. Denouncing their ethnic background in the front stage contexts such as school does not always mean total disengagement with the Udmurt or Mari belonging. Stigmatised identity is not entirely renounced but becomes a secret or a backstage identity, which can be shared only with best friends. Most children in this town have relatives in the countryside whom they visit, for example, on important ethnic festivities such as Semyk14 or Easter and where they are exposed to their native languages. Thus, the way pupils handle their ethnic belonging depends on their positions within their peer circles, their status at school and their links with ethnic communities.

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‘I Like to be Taken for a Tatar’: Passing as a (Christianised) Tatar A different example of how adolescents handle their ethnic belonging in the context of gendered interactions is the case of Marina. Marina is a 15year-old girl from an Udmurt family, studying in the ninth grade of a Russian-language school. Marina lives in a neighbourhood dominated by Tatars and has had Tatar-speaking friends since she was a child. Correspondingly, her language competence in Tatar is very good. Besides that, as she and her best friend, who is Kriashen (or Christianised Tatar), assert, she ‘looks very Tatar’. In conversation with her Kriashen friend, they use a mix of Tatar and Russian, which is typical for youth in this town. Although for people of Udmurt and Mari background it is difficult to ‘pass’ as a Tatar, because of the religious affiliation and Christian names, it is however possible to pass as a Kriashen.15 This is what Marina does from time to time, especially when she goes to her friends’ Kriashen village where they also meet local boys. She readily presents herself as a Kriashen/Christianised Tatar and proudly admits that everyone believes that because of her appearance. Marina: I like that I am taken for Tatar.16 It is better than being an Udmurt. DS: Why? Marina: Because children here do not like Udmurts, they treat them badly. They say: ‘Oh these Udmurts, I hate them!’ DS: Did you hear this yourself? Marina: No, someone told me about that. They dislike us. Even our neighbours. I think they don’t like us. Although there are people who like Udmurts because they speak three languages – Udmurt, Tatar and Russian. DS: Do you speak Udmurt? Marina: Yes, but not so good. My mother speaks Udmurt with me and I answer her in Russian. But I am proud to be an Udmurt. We know three languages! We are kind, cheerful and joyful. DS: And what do you like to be most? A Russian or a Tatar? Marina: I like to be a Tatar (laughing). But to be a Russian is also good here. People treat Russians better than Udmurts.

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The presentation of self as a Kriashen was facilitated for Marina in the context of interactions with Tatar-speaking but Christian Orthodox Kriashen where her Christian name and her good command of Tatar helped her to pass as a member of another ethnic group. She used her language competence and ethnic markers in particular social situations to gain social status within the group and disguise her stigmatised ethnic background. This is yet another example of how ethnic belonging can be renegotiated with the help of ethnic markers (language, name) for strategic reasons. Still, the disguised ethnic background is not rejected altogether. On the contrary, in the case of Marina (as well as a number of other students of Udmurt background that I talked to), there are signs of positive re-evaluation of the meanings of ethnic identity, expressed through the statements that Udmurts are talented in languages or that they are a kind and joyful people, which help these students to regain self-esteem and confidence.

‘We are all humans!’: resisting ethnicising discourse As these examples demonstrated, students devise various strategies of dealing with stigmatising ethnic ascriptions, displaying agency while negotiating their identities. When navigating and strategising within various social situations, however, they do so within the dominant framework of ethnicising discourse. They are not only clearly aware of ethnic stigmatisations but skilfully use ethnic markers to elude this stigmatisation in various social situations. However, there are examples of students who find this ethnicising discourse problematic in itself and articulate a critique of the dominant ways to describe, ascribe and divide. Damir is a 15-year-old boy in the tenth grade of the Russianlanguage school and is also regarded as one of the ‘popular’ guys at school. While at first sight he seems to be an example of ‘unproblematic’ Tatar background, in reality things are more complicated. While his name, his language competence in Tatar and official records qualify him as a Tatar, our conversation revealed that: ‘My father is Tatar and my mother is Russian. I was baptised. My Russian name is Denis. So, it turns out, I am a Christianised Tatar.17 This is what my parents told me. However, I feel more Russian’. However, then Damir told me that he speaks better Tatar than Russian because of his aunt who lives with him and speaks only Tatar

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with him. As I later found out, his mother was not Russian but Kriashen and came from a Kriashen village. Though his public identity at school is perceived as Tatar, except for his closest friends, no one in school actually knows that he feels more Russian. Everyone around him categorises him as a Tatar because of his Tatar name and Tatar language competence. This leads to situations when ‘some people do not know that I sympathise more with Russians and start to say bad things about Russians in my presence. Usually I get angry and try to explain to people that this is not true’. In conversations with Damir, I became aware of his deep concern and dissatisfaction with the processes of categorisation and ethnicisation that he encounters both at school and as outside of it. He told me that sometimes he reacts strongly against his classmates’ utterances about Russian villages being dirty and abandoned and contrasting them with Tatar villages that are ‘nice and cultivated’. These ethnicising discourses also have an impact on his private life. Dating a girl from a Muslim Tatar family became a problematic issue for him, which made the discourse of ethnicisation a personal concern: Why divide people in groups? We are all humans! We have two legs, two hands, we think. It is just the faith in God that is different. She [his girlfriend ] was telling me, when we are sitting by the table she will be reading her prayer, I will be reading mine. So what? We are praying to one God! She said we would divide children then. Why? Let the children grow up and they can choose themselves their religion. If my children choose Islam – I will not be against it. Like many of his other classmates, Damir is also involved in the game of ‘impression management’, presenting himself as a Tatar in the ‘front stage’ of school but experiencing more empathy and closeness to Russian identity in the backstage contexts. What distinguishes him from others is that, in his interactions with other peers and friends, he tries to resist ethnicising discourse, articulating a critique that fundamentally questions the need to ‘divide’ and ‘label’. This example shows that adolescents do not passively and uncritically reproduce and accept adult discourses but are able to problematise and criticise the hegemonic social narratives and frameworks.

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Conclusion These stories reveal how students devise ‘strategies of belonging’, strategically deciding when, how and with what means to highlight different ethnic markers and pass as a member of either this or that ethnic group. In this account, adolescents and children emerge as active agents who navigate complex social terrains, renegotiating and actively co-constructing their identities as actors in their own rights. At the same time, these examples draw our attention to school as a social scene where young people seek to gain recognition, status and sense of social adequacy. They do so against the backdrop of dominant societal discourses about ethnicity, gender and nationhood that elevate certain ethnic categories and stigmatise others. Goffman’s theory of dramaturgical analysis is one of the possible ways to interpret and conceptualise the experiences of these students. It highlights the performative, situated and interactional nature of identity that can be strategically renegotiated depending on the situations and contexts (front stage and backstage). These students find themselves in complex social situations of moving between the status roles they seek to acquire or have already acquired and ethnic ascriptions. Indeed, the sense of belonging of these young adolescents is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be reduced to one ethnic category but is rather shaped by the variety of experiences, practices, roles, competences and ascriptions by others. Thus, as Jenkins (2004:19) argues, the identities that others ascribe to us are as important to our renegotiation of identity as our own understandings of who we are: ‘It is not enough to assert an identity. That identity must also be validated (or not) by those with whom we have dealings. Identity is never unilateral’ (original emphasis). What the interactionist approach less satisfactorily accounts for are the ways societal discourses (on ethnicity, nationhood, gender) shape and constrain these adolescents’ strategies of belonging. As public discourse marginalises some young people’s ethnically ascribed categories, they are forced to deal with this by either bypassing, renegotiating or renouncing their ethnic identity or by engaging in cultural and political activism to change societal perceptions and stereotypes. We have seen the signs of this positive re-evaluation of ethnic categories in case of an Udmurt girl,

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Marina, who believes that Udmurts are talented in languages. However, this lacks a more fundamental positive redefinition. This however raises another important problem to consider. We, as scholars and researchers, are used to criticising essentialising discourses as reducing individual agency and the complexities of daily life and processes of identification. On the other hand, many ethnic communities in Russia today struggle to retain their identities and distinctiveness and resort to essentialism as a strategic instrument (Lallukka 2001; Wolff 2007). These ethnic groups are either silenced in educational and larger public discourses or are presented as communities frozen in the past, with cultural attributes pertaining to village life. Here these communities face what one might call the dilemma of cultural authenticity. Trying to retain their cultural distinctiveness and authenticity, they fall into the trap of folklorism, frozen-in-the-past representations of their culture – because only these are considered culturally authentic. However, these very representations also marginalise them. The dilemma of cultural authenticity is faced by many minority communities in Russia today and there are presently no appropriate political, cultural or discursive frameworks to develop new, alternative ways of self-representation that would be regarded as culturally authentic.

Notes 1. For example, teaching of the Tatar language as an obligatory subject at schools as well as teaching of the history of Tatarstan and the Tatar people. These initiatives have been implemented within the framework of the so-called ‘ethno-regional component’ in the school curriculum (Suleymanova 2017). 2. According to the latest Russian census results (2010), the population of Tatarstan is 53 per cent Tatar, 39 per cent Russian and 8 per cent representatives of other ethnic groups. Results available at: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_ site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm. 3. The languages of these ethnic groups are attributed by scholars to the FinnoUgric language group. 4. Thus in Tatarstan such subjects as the History of Tatarstan and the Tatar people as well as regional additions to other general subjects had to be taken out of lesson plans and only teaching of the Tatar language as an official language of the Republic of Tatarstan could be retained at schools. 5. For the protection of my informants I do not disclose the name of this town and do not give precise numbers on its ethnic composition. This town is a centre of an administrative district in Tatarstan and has around 16,000 inhabitants.

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6. Kriashen is a group that in the official public discourse in Tatarstan is regarded to be a subgroup of Tatars that was Christianised after the Russian conquest of Kazan in the middle of the sixteenth century. The origins of the Kriashen however have in recent years provoked academic and political debates, as the most active part of Kriashen regard themselves as a separate community who were Christian before the Russian conquest of the Volga-Ural area. Kriashen regard Tatar as their native language but profess Orthodox Christianity and have Christianised Russian names (for more on Kriashen see Kefeli 2014). In the area under study, Kriashen largely regarded themselves as a subgroup of Tatars (which is evident from the results of 2010 census in this area) and preferred to attend schools that instructed in the Tatar language. 7. Field notes, interviews and educational documents were coded and analysed in accordance with qualitative research methods, particularly grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1998). 8. Although scholars differ in their interpretation of this system of ‘institutionalised ethnicity’, as Zaslavsky, for example, regards some aspects of this system, such as the indication of ethnicity in the passports, as the prime instrument of Russification (Zaslavsky 1982). 9. Here I talk only about federal textbooks that are used for the overwhelming majority of school subjects. In the respective ‘ethnic’ republics, there is production of textbooks on native languages (mostly primary school textbooks) where these ethnic groups are represented, although mostly as village residents. See the case of the Udmurt republic (Vlasova and Plotnikova 2014). 10. The Christianisation campaigns took place after the Russian conquest of the Volga-Ural region in the middle of the sixteenth century. 11. By this, he actually referred to the controversies around the Multan case in nineteenth-century Russia, where a whole Udmurt village in Viatskaya province of the Russian Empire was accused of performing human sacrifices (Geraci 2000). 12. All names are pseudonyms. 13. Only his language competence could expose him as a non-Russian, as the comment of his classmate demonstrates. At the same time this comment also reveals the perception of Russians in these settings. 14. Semyk is a Mari tradition of the commemoration of the dead. 15. To pass as Tatars for Mari and Udmurts is also possible through conversion to Islam. 16. In this conversation she used the word ‘Tatar’. 17. It is important to note that he used the term kreshchenyi tatarin (Christianised Tatar) and not kriashen (Kriashen). The term Kriashen is often used by more self-conscious Kriashen who regard themselves as a separate ethnic group.

CHAPTER 2 BORDERS OF A BORDERLAND: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY IN MOLDOVA TODAY A´gnes Patakfalvi-Czirja´k1 and Csaba Zahora´n

Introduction Many experts see and refer to Moldova as a country of social cleavages and permanent ‘identity crisis’ (Negura˘ 2015; Calus 2014) or as the terrain of the constantly battling ‘hot’ and ‘banal nationalisms’ – characteristic for most Eastern European countries in their view – or as the source of geopolitical problems (Otarashvili and Lidicker 2014). Transnistria depends on the Russian government for support, which means the issue of the country’s instability remains part of public discourse (O’Loughlin et al. 2008; Calus 2014:77). The other problematic topic reinforcing the instability agenda is the state’s poor performance in defining differences and similarities of identities (Verdery 1995). The dilemmas and uncertainties concerning the issues of identities and politics of memory (Chinn 1997:43– 51; Chinn-Kaiser 1996) are highly influential; they determine the country’s stability too. These dilemmas are strengthened by the forced mutual exclusivity and opposition between different identity categories – such as ‘Romanian’, ‘Moldovan’, ‘from Moldova’, ‘Russian’, ‘Soviet’, ‘Gagauz’, ‘Jew’, etc., – maintained by the political powers. The uncertain economic situation and the slow change in social structures make this worse, thus

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generating a certain grey zone (Knudsen and Frederiksen 2015) and preserving a constant ‘in-between’ state on the periphery of Europe (Green 2015). On the other hand, most experts do not mention everyday experiences – the way people feel about their identity, the political issues and the way they form and shape social practices. They do not analyse either the way these uncertainties and conflicts become an integral part of people’s everyday lives (they are ‘domesticated’) or the way identities become meaningful to people and this ‘in-between’ state somewhat liveable for them. Eleanor Knott pointed out the necessity of bottom-up and people-centred research in this field (Knott 2015b) and we had similar motivations – to see how nation-building and identification processes work in Moldova ‘on the ground’, in everyday situations. Our analysis2 of everyday identities in Moldova is based on participant observation in public spaces, commemorations, of language use on the streets and in the private sphere, education, public discourse in the media and other aspects of everyday life. Our observation shows that the memory of ‘hot’ nationalism, the parallel nation-buildings and state-building, the ‘weak’ state and everyday multi-ethnic relations are too complicated to place the country on one of the two opposing poles of an imagined dichotomy (‘hot’ and ‘banal’). Furthermore, our research also reveals that the analysis of everyday relations in Moldova presupposes the understanding and presentation of social, historical contexts and antecedents as well. In the following sections we focus on the changes in different ethnic/ national categories, the relations (asymmetries, sometimes conflicts) between them, how they are reproduced and given cultural meaning in everyday interactions. We describe major pathways of the past and recent history of the Republic of Moldova and present examples to illustrate how nationhood is ‘produced and reproduced in everyday life’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008:537) in Moldova by ‘performing the nation’ and marking public spaces. Then we concentrate on the phenomenon of identity and the complex system of local relations based on our fieldwork, focusing mainly on language use, national orientation and on signs and everyday manifestations of national affiliation (‘talking’, ‘choosing’ and ‘consuming the nation’) (see Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). Although a strong relation exists in Moldova between identity and political orientation, we argue that this can be overridden by personal

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life strategies and everyday practices. Political mechanisms create and operate with exclusive identity categories but our findings show that this is not always in accordance with everyday choices. We also argue that the transformations of the public spaces and urban art (‘identity stencils’) in Moldova do not reflect a collective memory or a consensus beyond the rival identity politics, but are manifestations of domination and politicisation of public space. The same process is apparent in other spheres as well: use of language is defined more by power asymmetries than by common practices. The asymmetries are influential in other fields of the everydays too: in language usage in private spheres, ethnicisation of consumption, education and labour market, etc.

State-Building and Nation-Building in Moldova The everyday dynamics of ethnic boundaries in Moldova can best be understood in terms of the old political mechanisms used in the Soviet Union.3 Rogers Brubaker reviews not only the idea of the ‘institutionalised multinational’ in the Soviet Union, but reflects upon post-Soviet relations as well. He highlights that independent Moldova has inherited all the hidden contradictions and problems of the Soviet system – such as the tension originating from applying nation theory simultaneously to territorial-political and individual-cultural levels (Brubaker 1996:42). The phenomenon of ‘institutionalised multinationality’ manifests itself today in the fact that people ‘collect’ several passports and citizenships.4 Having more than one citizenship – and the attendant documents and rights – is possible due to the fact that after 1991 several nation states – such as Russia and Romania – started to act as ‘mother countries’ for Moldova. Besides Russia and Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria and Israel also tried to connect politically and culturally with the Gagauz, the Bulgarian and Jewish minority groups respectively. Such citizenship politics was a new and efficient tool to redraw borders and to strengthen renewed nation-building aims. Citizenship not only reflects one’s national identity, but at the same time it has a practical usage too. Therefore, today’s trans-sovereign nation-building uses similar strategies (Csergo˝ and Goldgeier 2004; Isaacs and Polese 2016). The uncertain relations and social fault lines in Moldova have generated uncertainty concerning the real ‘identity’ of the Republic of Moldova, even after gaining independence. This means that a consensual

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relation between the state and its citizens has failed to arise, thus it is unclear whether this relation is based on citizenship (territorial) or on ethno-cultural (national) affiliation (Negura˘ 2012). Since the 1990s this uncertainty has been exacerbated by many other factors. Romania has established a political and cultural connection to ethnic Romanians from Moldova through different institutions (similarly, Russian-speaking inhabitants were connected to Russia and the Gagauz to Turkey); the frozen conflict of Transnistria (see Blakkisrud and Kolstø 2011) left borders uncontrolled; the serious problem of emigration emerged (see Bloch 2013; Horva´th and Kiss 2015:120– 1), the economic hopelessness and the corrupt political system (Transparency International – Moldova 2015) made the country a grey zone (Knudsen and Frederiksen 2015). All these issues make it hard for the state to establish legitimate authority capable of creating a unified identity politics. Despite the struggle of different political powers to nationalise and dominate everyday life in Moldova, which manifests itself on institutional level too, multinational and multi-ethnic contexts are normal, taken for granted and the cultural environment is still highly shaped by the former mechanisms and traditions of the Soviet Union. The general use of Russian is appropriate evidence for this hypothesis.5 At least in Chis¸ina˘u, Russian is the obvious ‘lingua franca’ for different ethnocultural groups (such as the Gagauz, Jews, Bulgarians, Ukrainians). Therefore, everyday interactions based on inherited social mechanisms from the Soviet era overwrite the aim of the Romanian state to turn Moldova into a ‘little Romania’. We can argue that nationalising everyday experiences is most successful in the case of ‘hot’ nationalism (see Billig’s definition 1995:45– 6). In the case of a region with a multiethnic background, of people with affiliations to several nations – national identity and citizenship become important when it comes to issues such as employability,6 or when one has to decide whether one wants to become a fan of Tiraspol’s football team or of the Romanian national football team. In Moldova the relation between the state and its citizens is shaped mainly by the different ‘mother’ countries, by the national minority groups and adjacent political entities the mother countries support and their visions of a nation. There is significant dynamism in the power field of the nationalising states, mother countries and

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minority groups, because these are not functioning in all cases as political actors (following Brubaker’s theory).7 For example, the Ukrainian and Bulgarian minority communities are less involved in political struggles; they do not function as politically defined collective actors.8 However, in some circumstances they can support or, on the contrary, oppose the political integration of Moldova’s population. For example, in the instrumentalisation of the ‘Moldovanist’ category. As many researchers have found, identity politics in post-Soviet countries, kin relations and geopolitical questions are part of the same discursive field and so identity politics can serve as legitimisation for nation-building (see Laurelle 2015; Brubaker 1996; King 2002; Protsyk 2007; Oleksy 2012). Our fieldwork also underlines that in Moldova the terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Romanian’ have become two mutually exclusive categories and the asymmetry between the two is displayed on many levels (civilisations, political systems, geopolitically defined regions and as oppressors and oppressed ‘nations’). In a 2015 study Petru Negura˘ notes that weak state institutions of Moldova were taken over by interest groups and observes the political and geopolitical fluctuation of the governing elites. The fact that civil society is divided when it comes to cultural, identity and geopolitical issues reflects the seriousness of the dilemmas about the questions of nation and national identity in the country. The weak state9 refers to the inefficiency of state institutions, to the failure in solving critical social issues and to the lack of basic social consensus. In this context, expressing one’s ethnicity and national affiliation becomes a ‘tool’ for everyday struggle and it transforms such struggle into political statements (Negura˘ 2015).

Competing Identity Categories The broader context of the last two centuries of the history of the Republic of Moldova is alternate attempts to integrate the country or pursue independence. Several regional powers concomitantly sought to annex and transform the area, while the local population had rather a passive role in these processes. This sometimes led to the strengthening of local characteristics, sometimes to their marginalisation, but in the end, they all contributed to the consolidation of Moldova’s frontierstatus – the zone of political, economic and cultural collisions (Livezeanu 1995; King 2002; Petrescu 2001; Cas¸u 2008a and 2008b).

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All ‘integration’ periods have left their mark on the region’s population. Spontaneous and organised immigration, together with urbanisation processes, have increased the region’s ethnic diversity – these processes started during the Russian dominancy and accelerated in the Soviet period (Charles King pointed out that in the Soviet Union the third most ‘Russified’ nationality were the Moldovans, see 2002:19 – 27 and 118 – 23). Another important factor was that the local Romanian-speaking population was prevented from contributing to the nation-building and state-building politics of Romania on the western side of the Prut River – except for a short period in the interwar period – and preserved its ‘Moldovan’ regional identity (Petrescu 2001:153 – 78; Livezeanu 1995:89 – 127; King 1994:345 – 68). This was complemented by the doctrine of ‘Moldovanism’ – the existence of an independent ‘Moldovan nation’ – created in the 1920s. Its main purpose was to differentiate the Romanian-speaking community living in Moldova from the Romanian nation (see Cas¸u 2008b:75 – 81; King 2002:63 – 123). The political, social and economic processes within the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (1944– 91) still define the identity and the dependencies of the inheritor state. Furthermore, contradictory views about the results of socialist modernisation have led to a huge gap between the two opposing parties in the local population; these constitute both the roots and tools of different party politics and identity politics. In the 1980s to 1990s, parallel to the decline of socialism and fall of the Soviet Union, besides the democratic transition and state-building, several different nation-building processes were born in Moldova, forming many rival identification categories (King 2002; Protsyk 2007; Oleksy 2012). The category of ‘Moldovanism’, which plays a crucial role in the Moldovan identity politics, is a complex one. Piotr Oleksy identifies three different nuances of this ‘ideology’: besides ‘Eastern Moldovanism’ characterised by Slavic affiliations – this constitutes the basis of the ideology for the Transnistrian state-building – in addition there are ‘Civic Moldovanism’ and ‘Ethnic Moldovanism’ (Oleksy 2012: 602– 5). Advocates of the ‘Civic Moldovanism’10 aim at creating and consolidating the Moldovan political nation, which includes all citizens of the Republic of Moldova equally, irrespective of their ethnicities and

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nationalities. They primarily focus on the independency and sovereignty of Moldova. They acknowledge the common ethno-cultural roots of Romanians from Moldova and Romanians from Romania, however they consider Romanians from Moldova an independent group. Furthermore, they emphasise the need to integrate all the other non-Romanianspeaking ethnic groups. Similarly, advocates of ‘Ethnic Moldovanism’ stress a citizenship-based integration of the different ethnic groups. Moreover, they believe in the idea of an independent ‘Moldovan nation’ and Moldovan language. Moscow has always supported not only the aims of the Russian-speaking community, but also those influential ‘Moldovanist’ politicians and economic interest groups (such as leaders of factories and farming collectives) who feared the increasing power of Romanian nationalist movements and Moldova’s estrangement from the Soviet Union. Therefore, Moldovanism is often considered a ‘spoiling tactic’ – a movement serving the interests of the Russian regional hegemon. On the other hand, there is another influential group formed by the ‘Unionists’,11 the advocates of Moldova’s union with Romania. Except for the interwar period, the Romanian nation-building movements were quite limited in Bessarabia and later in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (Cas¸u 2008b:78; T¸urcanu 2010: 504– 9). However, from the end of the 1980s, Romanian nationalist aims started to become more determined. In spite of the fact that only a small proportion of the Romanian-speaking community from Moldova have identified with these aims, the unionists had a clear goal: to (re)integrate Romanians from Moldova into Romania – separated from Romania by force in 1812 – and to (re)unite Moldova with Romania (Oleksy 2012:128). Most critiques addressing the unionist ideology state that its advocates (from both sides of the Prut River) ignore all the other non-Romanian ethnic groups living in the country and that they use a narrow nationbuilding idea dating from the nineteenth century based on cultural essentialism. This group stresses the Daco-Roman origins of Moldovans, which implicitly excludes the non-Romanian-speaking population. They focus on issue such as how to teach history at schools – whether to teach ‘History of Romanians’, ‘Integrated History’ or simply ‘History’ (see Worden 2011; Danero Iglesias 2013). Also the ‘Romanian’ category which we named simply ‘Unionist’ is more complex: for example, Knott in her study differentiates four meanings of identification with the

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Romanian nation in Moldova (‘Organic’, ‘Cultural’, ‘Ambiguous Romanians’ and ‘Moldovans’) (Knott 2015a:846).12 In 1989, more than one-third of Moldova’s population was of nonRomanian mother tongue13 – mainly Russians, Ukrainians, Gagauz and other ethnic groups generally mistrustful and hostile to the increasing Romanian nationalist rhetoric and to unionist visions to (re)unite Moldova and Romania. The Russian-speaking community is made up of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and others coming from different member states of the Soviet Union. Their members live mostly in cities and have relatively high social status. After the fall of the Soviet Union they shifted from dominant group to ‘imperial minority’ (Brubaker 1996: 48–60), yet have tried to keep their influence (King 2002:176–7). In time, part of the pro-Russian population moved to Russia or to Ukraine, while those remaining in Moldova have lined up behind those political actors promising to keep the status quo or at least to fight against Romanian nationalism. After the secession of Transnistria, the political representation of the Russian-speaking community from Moldova has been taken over by left-oriented groups (socialists, communists). Thus, the aim of preserving the Russian language and Russian identity is connected to nostalgia for the Soviet times. Romanian nationalists often criticise ethnic Russians for moving to Moldova only to represent the interests of the Russian Empire; they do not want to integrate into their new homeland (it is common that they do not speak Romanian) and they are loyal rather to their ‘mother country’ instead of Moldova.14 However, the identity constructions presented never exist in their ‘pure’ forms; they are present in the fields of politics and the public sphere and especially in people’s everyday interactions in many different forms simultaneously. Moldova’s complexity is not unique within the post-Soviet area. For instance, Paul Pirie, in his study on national identities in Ukraine, distinguishes between at least four types of ethnic self-identifications (from strong identification with one ethnic group to strong identification with more ethnic groups, Kolossov 1999:72), while Ray Taras uses the metaphor of the Matryoshka doll to describe the multiple and hierarchical character of national identities (see Kolossov 1999:72). During our fieldwork in Moldova we experienced the permanency of these identity constructions, but at the same time, also their dependency on concrete situations: many interviewees from

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Chis¸ina˘u identified themselves with several identity categories such as Soviet, Romanian or Moldovan.15 Different groups use various methods and tools of identity politics. When in power, they try to restructure the different state institutions (e.g., the public media, public administration, methods of teaching history and politics of memory) according to their own needs and purposes and according to their own nation-building ideology. Furthermore, they try to mobilise supporters among the population for as long as possible. Here they make use of the latest technology – the professional use of the internet and of social media has become an indispensable tool.

Nationalising Collective Memory in the Public Spaces A spectacular manifestation of identity politics in Moldova – of the fragmentary and contradictory character of Moldovan identity and of collective memory due to the lack of consensus – consists in the ‘rivalry’ of public symbols in Chis¸ina˘u. Although most of the communist memorials were removed at the beginning of the 1990s, there are still a lot of Soviet monuments in Chis¸ina˘u. Indeed, some communist monuments have been reinstated subsequently under the communist parties’ government between 2001–9 (Musteat¸a˘ 2012:108). After the government change in 2009, another turn in the battle for dominating public spheres took place. The central square in front of the Parliament – a special terrain in the battle of memory politics – is a good example. While until 1991 a Lenin statue stood there, today there is a stone monument to the memory of the victims of the Soviet occupation and of the totalitarian communist regime. The goal of this unfinished monument – raised in 2010 – is obvious: that the condemnation of the Soviet past is perfectly suitable for mobilising against (post-)communist and pro-Russian forces (see more detailed Musteat¸a˘ 2012:115–20). One of the most important Romanian national symbols – of Romanian cultural genesis – is the statue of the Capitoline Wolf in front of the National History Museum of Moldova. The first wolf statue from Chis¸ina˘u was a gift from Italy to Greater Romania to celebrate common Latin roots, but after Moldova became part of the Soviet Union the statue disappeared without a trace. Only after almost 50 years,

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on 1 December 1990 – the anniversary of the new National Day of Romania, the day of union with Transylvania – did they get another copy. The statue had a strong symbolic meaning and message about the common roots with Romania and was removed in 2005 for restoration purposes. It reappeared again only after the change in government from 2009. In 2010, Moldova received another Capitoline Wolf statue, which was placed in Edinet¸, a town in the northern part of the country (where almost half of the city’s population is ethnic Russian and Ukrainian). Another interesting piece of art – similar to the Capitoline Wolf – is also meant to symbolise the (Daco-)Roman origins of the Romanians. A miniature and inconsistent version of Trajan’s Column – tiny in comparison to the original one and lacking reliefs about the DacoRoman battle – is rather out of place in the context of the residential area where it was placed at the beginning of 2000.16 The copies of the Capitoline Wolf and of Trajan’s Column all refer to the great origins of the Romanian nation. Moreover, they symbolise national unity and, at the same time, they reveal that Romanian nationalists believe that ethnic essentialism is stronger and more legitimate than the politically instrumentalised memories of the recent past. The Jewish minority from Chis¸ina˘u seems missing from the city’s collective memory – the lack of Jewish cultural representation in Moldova is unique in the post-Soviet region, despite the fact that the Jewish community was historically significant.17 One representative example for the politics of memory in Chis¸ina˘u is the story of the monument raised in memory of the victims of fascism. The statue by Aurel David was raised in 1991 at the exact spot where 14,000 people – mostly Jews – were killed during World War II. The statue was later damaged and removed. On the empty lot a car showroom was built and above the mass grave a car wash and a parking lot were installed. The statue was restored at the expense of the international Jewish community, but its reinstatement was impossible because of the car showroom. Finally, the inauguration of the new statue together with a commemoration ceremony took place in a park established in the parking lot on 8 May 2005.18 Absurdly, most of the speakers emphasised the importance of respect for the collective memory of the Jewish community. Public spaces from the capital city of Transnistria and of other border cities such as Bender (Tighina) show opposite trends to the ones in

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Chis¸ina˘u. The trends have strengthened since the beginning of the 1990s. These separatist areas are characterised by a twofold politics of memory. On the one hand, there is a trend to honour well-known personages of the international and Soviet labour movement (Liebknecht, Marx, Lenin) and the great generals of the Russian Empire (Suvorov, Kutuzov) – their names stand on monuments and street signs in Tiraspol. On the other hand, there is a trend to commemorate the victims of the recent armed conflicts of the Soviet Union – from Afghanistan to the Transnistrian War from 1992.

The Stencils of Identity One specific form of ‘occupying’ the public spaces of Chis¸ina˘u is reflected in the stencil graffiti works – a popular genre of street art – around the city. These stencils usually function as slogans with strong messages about belonging to the Romanian or Moldovan nation. The most common ones are: ‘Moldovans are Romanians’, ‘We are Romanians and that’s it’, ‘Moldovans equal Romanians’, ‘Bessarabia is Romania’, ‘Bessarabia is Romanian territory . . . under Russian occupation for 200 years, so get over to the other side of the Prut River’, ‘Antonescu is a national hero’.19 All these messages highlight the ideas of genealogy and territorial unity, the unquestionable unity of culture and nationality and thus they glorify the past. The sticker depicting Greater Romania has become the symbol of the Romanian national-cultural unity. The authors of such nationalist slogans ignore both the complex identity dilemmas characteristic for Moldova and its multiethnic population, replacing these with the idea of national-cultural unity of Moldovans and Romanians and with other arguments for the union between the two countries. Another category of street stencils – in opposition to the previous ones – represent the ideologies of ‘ethnic’ and ‘citizens’ Moldovanism’. Such pictorial representations use either Moldova’s territorial lines and inscriptions like ‘I love Moldova’ or make reference to the Moldovan language: ‘I am Moldovan and Moldovan is my language’. Some others use the old coat of arms with a bison head and the inscription ‘Moldovan Voivod’ making reference to the former independent Moldovan Principality. These stencils are not exclusivist – they build upon the idea of citizens Moldovanism – but, as we saw earlier – they trigger

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the antipathy and opposition of some ethnic Romanians, as the focus on Moldovan values are interpreted as continuity with the Soviet Regime. The most interesting part of this ‘political battle’ from the street is how different reactions to unionist and nationalist slogans are born – for example, to a sign from Puskin street, downtown, which praises the Moldovan language and Moldovan nationality, there have been added subsequently the following two sentences: ‘You are an idiot!’ and ‘You are crazy’. To stencils proclaiming unity with the Romanian nation were most often added the inscription ‘Fascists’. It is also common to just spread red paint on them or to strike through the inscriptions with paint. There are examples of rewriting and word play as well, for example: ‘Europe does not have (Soviet) values!’, ‘We (don’t) want the union!’, ‘We want union (with Tiraspol)!’, ‘Bessarabia is (not) Romania!’, ‘Antonescu is a national hero/killer’. We believe that these street stencils represent well both the complex local relations and topical issues of identity politics. They reflect on the issues of separatism, parallelism, different pursuits and cultural affiliations and they reveal the historical approach behind identity politics. The answers and reactions to these signs and stencils transform the public spaces into a ‘national note board’ – an unconventional tool for the ‘civil’ politics of memory. While street art usually celebrates freedom of expression and treats the city as a free ‘surface’, in the case of Chis¸ina˘u this genre is part of national propaganda; the political elite and other movements expropriate it. Moreover, there is another interesting detail: all street art in Chis¸ina˘u uses the official language of the country – they are all in Romanian. Thus, the only legitimate language of identity politics in Chis¸ina˘u is Romanian.

Transformations of Identity through the Lens of the Everyday Beyond the frames of different symbolical struggles over public spaces, language use is the terrain which can reveal the dynamism of identities and their variations, their transformations according to the actual context. Everyday situations can reveal the complex reality which other analyses are not capable of describing or sometimes just ignore. Language in Moldova has been one of the key issues of the regime change

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and of independence and a source of tension since the very beginning: it has become the essential symbol of different cultures and the main tool of identity politics at the same time. Starting from the second part of the 1980s a central goal of the Romanian ethnic-cultural emancipation groups was to introduce the Latin version of Romanian and to make it an official language. On the other hand, for conservative (communist) leaders – acting in the name of the ethnic Russians – the protection of the Russian language became a key tool for mobilisation against undesired change. Even though the ‘language strikes’ from 1989 to 1990 could not stop or reverse the decision to make Romanian (Moldovan) an official language nor the introduction of the Latin spelling – these became official on 31 August 1989 – on the other side of the Dniester River these new laws couldn’t be applied. This led later to Transnistrian separatism.20 Later, the Russian language became the central element of language politics: Pro-Russian communist groups aimed at preserving the use of the Russian language in as many areas as possible – they fought for teaching Russian at school and for making Russian the second official language of the country. This aim runs through the whole history of independent Moldova, it spreads across the fields of legislation, media and public demonstrations (Prina 2015; Ciscel 2007). However, the official legislations on language rights and the everyday use of languages are often two parallel phenomena. This is especially true in the case of Moldova, where there are still communities whose younger members do not speak and do not understand the official language of the state. The everyday interactions in Chis¸ina˘u form a dazzling chain of actions where language is not the main symbol of ethnic-national identity; it is just a tool of banal everyday life (cf. Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008:541– 2). Language use differs from situation to situation: state bureaucracy uses mainly Romanian, whereas Russian is used in business meetings and in some areas of academic life. In everyday interactions and in family contexts these languages are used alternately; in some families they mix these languages randomly, in some others, they switch from one language to the other depending on the topic and on the intended message. The story of one of our interviewees provides a great example for switching identities in sequence and for acquiring different ‘identitylayers’ through time. He was born in a poor Romanian family of peasants, started his education in a Russian school and acquired his

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higher education in the Soviet system. He believed that becoming a Russian soldier would ensure a chance to break out. Due to his excellent Russian skills he earned recognition as a soldier; later he fought in Afghanistan as well. To strengthen his Soviet identity, he married a Ukrainian woman and, according to him, all this helped in acquiring a property in the centre of Chis¸ina˘u. During the regime change he fought in Transnistria too as a Soviet soldier. Afterwards, he got a pension and settled down in Chis¸ina˘u. At first he spoke Russian at home with his wife, but when their child was born, they thought it important for the child to know Romanian culture, therefore the whole family switched to using Romanian. Mother and child learned to speak Romanian at the same time from one of the grandparents who lived with the family. The child speaks Russian only with his mother’s family and after graduation he plans to work in Belgium or in The Netherlands. The family has taken over Romanian traditions and holidays as well, as they consider the Orthodox holidays as old-fashioned. With a few exceptions, they spend their holidays with their relatives who have moved to Romania. The conflict in Ukraine has strengthened their view that the only way for Moldova to gain peace is to follow the direction shown by Romania, thus they allow their son to participate in protests and events promoting the union between Moldova and Romania. The family considers itself Moldovan – thus legitimising mixed marriage too – however, they want their child to identify as Romanian and they detest those relatives who stick to ‘Soviet values’ and try their luck in Russia. This family legitimises the decision to change from Russian to Romanian language and customs mainly with the need to overcome the Soviet past. The father believes that the most important thing is to assess how the family can make a living and that they have to adapt to that particular situation. The question of identity is secondary. The following biography shows another direction. A Ukrainian woman working for the local Communist party got married to a widowed engineer from Moscow at the beginning of the 1970s. The husband hardly knew anything about Romanian culture as he interacted mostly with the Russian-speaking community from Moldova. After the regime change they became pensioners and they bought an apartment for themselves and one for their daughter. The daughter is also part of the Russian-speaking community, she studied in St Petersburg and, after an unsuccessful marriage, she moved back to Moldova. The family speaks

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Russian exclusively; the mother uses her poor Romanian when necessary to solve administrative-official issues. The daughter met a Romanian man and started a relationship. The parents oppose the marriage and the young couple remain unmarried. This situation and the Romanian origins of the father lead to constant fights in the family.21 They identify as Moldovans and they would like to live in an economically more stable and independent Moldova. They do not intend to get closer to Romanian culture, traditions or to the Romanian language; they always find a way not to use it or to avoid unpleasant situations. The interviewee made remarks on this situation connected to the use of the Romanian language. She experienced humiliation many times in interaction with state and local bureaucracy, which makes her encounters with the official sphere uncomfortable. In this multi-ethnic environment, identity is often instrumentalised: choosing an identity generally means a political statement. In the two biographies some turning-points motivated by the international contexts are present, which changed the ‘orientations’ of the interviewees (‘pro-Russian’, ‘pro-Romanian’, ‘pro-European’). However, ‘choosing identity’ is not only a political orientation or an emotional bond, from the mentioned situations it is obvious that it can be a pragmatic decision too. In the example of education, from the biographies it is visible that the pattern of school choice (in the first case Romanian, in the second one a Russian one in Russia) has not changed structurally after 1991: in both cases the motivations show the efforts to synchronise identities and life strategies. Later, choosing the right nation can also widen the opportunities in the labour market (e.g., working in Western Europe or in Russia). The exclusiveness of the identity categories may have another effect: it can cause tensions in families that can lead to serious conflicts (in both biographies).

Language, Asymmetrical Power Relations and Everyday Practices Everyday language use reflects the complex social system of Moldova. We have encountered several institutions – independent of the fieldwork we have conducted – where we could identify forms of power manifestations through language use. One example was at the Immigration Office from Chis¸ina˘u, where information is in three

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languages – Russian, Romanian and English. The increased number of applications for Moldovan citizenship since the Ukrainian conflict can explain this. However, the actual administrative process showed a different set of power relations, where the lack of speaking Romanian is a disadvantage or at least it makes a big difference. Besides Romanian, English is also accepted – an Italian client was asked to use English instead of Russian, as ‘English is the common language which connects Romanians and Italians’. In other everyday interactions such as at local shops, restaurants and cafe´s, both Romanian and Russian are used. Older generations switch from one language to the other without a problem. On the other hand, there are some places in the city where Russian is the privileged language, for example some shopping centres (NR1) and restaurants (Andy’s Pizza, La Pla˘cinte), which are present in most big cities of Moldova and in major cities of Transnistria too. In the context of language politics, several studies conducted in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s have reported that Russian language has kept its key position in many areas,22 and the ‘spread’ of the country’s official language has come to a halt (King 2002:172–3). However, this seems to have changed lately: in Chis¸ina˘u there is a strong effort to unify and clarify the official language of administration. This sometimes aggressive effort to make the Romanian language dominant implicitly means driving back all other languages (mainly Russian) from the public sphere in Moldova. Many of our interviewees with Russian backgrounds have confirmed that everyday situations of public administration can be problematic for those not speaking Romanian, therefore in these situations they ask for help from acquaintances who speak Romanian. We would like to illustrate the power relations behind the use of the official language with an incident at the public notary’s office. We had to turn to a notary to certify a contract and one of the contracting parties spoke Romanian only at a basic level. The notary asked, having seen only her name written down, why she did not use the Romanian version of her name and why she hadn’t requested the correction of her name on her identity card. When the client was reading the contract, the notary mentioned in a lecturing manner: ‘the time of Cyrillic letters has already gone, it is time to learn the Latin letters’, then she added that she hoped that ‘more and more people would learn the official language of the

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country, so there weren’t so many issues with the old-fashioned part of the society’. The client – the owner of an apartment – tolerated the comments without any replies and only after signing the contract had one retort: ‘I am old and the only thing I want is to have a peaceful life’. This kind of situation makes clear the asymmetrical relations between the client and the normative ‘power’. In their everyday interactions, most people can easily switch between the two languages and people can easily detect which language is most suitable in different situations. Several conversations revealed that one guiding sign to detect which language to use is clothing: some pieces of clothing are considered – according to their brand or style – more Western-like (thus automatically one should use Romanian) or more traditional (equating to Moldovan or Soviet ientity, thus the language should be Russian). Other signs of one’s ‘main’ language could be the labels and inscriptions on shopping bag or the number plate of one’s car. This idea of conferring extra meaning to everyday signs like number plates is typical for Eastern Europe. In Chis¸ina˘u, local authorities have recently introduced the option to include the place of registration on the number plate in Russian. As owning a car is also a sign of social status, the idea of introducing number plates in Russian reflects an identity struggle as well. The number plates containing the letter ‘K’ (standing for ‘Kishinev’ in Russian23) instead of the letter ‘C’ (for ‘Chis¸ina˘u’ in Romanian) generate an automatic categorisation of the car’s owner as member of the Russian community – and ‘against’ Romanian nation and culture – which is often considered as an act of provocation by local ‘conscious’ Romanians. In conclusion, according to this logic, if a car has a number plate with the letter ‘K’, it is advisable to use Russian to communicate with its owner. These everyday interactions – including small gestures and signs – form a special knowledge and ensemble of traditions, which usually go unnoticed by the mainstream debates of identity politics. They can transform into signs of ethnicity and strengthen the ethnic borders. However, these levels of local knowledge reflect the national discourses appropriately; they are influenced and formed by the latter, while they translate ideologies onto the practical level. Elements of banal and hot nationalism – which recur in connection with certain topics – are present simultaneously in these relations.

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Conclusion Although the geopolitical, historical and economic situation of Eastern Europe is essential to nation/state-building, in this chapter we have tried to describe how these mechanisms are transferred to the very complex everyday lives of people from Moldova. We connect different layers of nationalism present in the country through a few examples of the various manifestations of identity and identity politics. Our examples faithfully show the many discrepancies between the aims of identity politics, language issues, and politics of memory, on the one hand, and people’s everyday life experiences and interactions, on the other hand. The inherited ethnic/national variegation, identities and their multiple variations in the everyday situations do not fit so neatly those ethno-political categories offered by the political elites of Moldova and the involved countries. The hegemony of political discourses glosses over the construction of these categories and their interactions in everyday life. As we saw in Moldova there are Eastern, Civic and Ethnic Moldovanism and Unionism as the main political categories and ethnic categories of Moldovans, Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Slavs, etc. They are arranged in a complex hierarchical structure; they derive from each other, function beside each other and are situationally dependent and grounded in actual contexts. The exact contexts define which category can be used: as seen in one of our stories, when a mixed family consciously prepared a child for life in the EU by ‘becoming Romanian’. Analysts often label this phenomenon as Moldova’s ‘identity crisis’ and stress Moldova’s prolonged limbo between West (Europe) and East (Russia). Although the term ‘identity crisis’ is accurate in many respects, it is also a good example of political expropriation of identity-construction mechanisms. Petru Negura˘ states that the ‘identity crisis’ discourse has become an integral part of the regime change narrative in Moldova, thus it has become unquestionable, despite the fact that this so-called identity crisis is mainly the issue of the ethnic Romanian elites and does not concern the rest of the population of the Republic of Moldova.

Notes 1. We would like to thank the Erasmus Mundus Programme (Eastern Partnership) for the possibility to research in Republic of Moldova and also ULIM (Universitatea Libera˘ Internat¸ionala˘ din Moldova) for their generous hospitality.

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2. During fieldwork in Moldova (December 2014 to July 2015) we attended many public events: the opening ceremony of the second semester at the schools (in a Romanian and a Turkish School), Spring Festival in Tiraspol and Chis¸ina˘u (Ma˘rt¸is¸or Day), International Women’s Day, Rememberance Day of the Jewish community in Chis¸ina˘u, Orthodox Eastern and Radonica with local families and two ‘unionist’ protests. We attended the military parade, Victory Day in Tiraspol, and EU-day in Chis¸ina˘u. We observed the everyday interactions at the Piat¸a Centrala˘, in several institutions: migration office, hospital, notary office, football matches, universities. We paid attention to ‘ethnic interactions’ (noted which language is common within random interactions, how the language was used to mark asymmetrical power relations). During a workshop we collected interviews and personal stories of students with different ethnic backgrounds (Intercultural Workshop and Simulation Development on Moldova, organised by DAAD Moldova). Within the third part of the research we collected biographies, which showed the turning points within personal lives, the reinterpretations of the different historical contexts and personal identities. In this period we collected photos, official reports, articles from online and printed media (mostly newspapers in Romanian: Ziarul NAT¸IONAL, Timpul, Jurnal de Chis¸ina˘u, Adeva˘rul (edit¸ie de Moldova). We documented events and symbols of national or ethnical identities like statues, street signs, the collections of the ethnographic and historical museums, public cemeteries in Chis¸ina˘u and in Tiraspol. 3. In the historical context Moldovanism was crucial, see: King 2002:63 – 123, Cas¸u 2008. 4. See Patakfalvi-Czirja´k-Zahora´n 2016:110 – 11. 5. Eurobarometrul-Republica Moldova, Barometrul de Opinie Publica˘ (Chis¸ina˘u: Institutul de Politici Publice, 2015): ,http://ipp.md/public/files/Barometru/ BOP_04.2015_prima_parte_finale.pdf. . 6. Russian citizenship becomes important for those who want to work in Russia, the Romanian passport becomes relevant who want to work in the EU. See more detailed Horva´th-Kiss 2016, Laurelle 2015, Bloch 2014. 7. Brubaker’s triadic relations ignore the dynamism of these affiliations: the changing nature of the concept ‘nationhood’. The relations and images between the three political actors changed a lot in the last few decades. As some of our interviewees mentioned, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was ‘clear’, that Romania is a poor and ‘dark’ country, they felt a cultural and economic distance between the two regions. This perspective is stressed by the main characters from the documentary named ‘Landlocked’, directed by Maarten de Kroon (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ oVpItzanw7Q, Accessed 10 September 2016). 8. As an interviewee mentioned: ‘We Bulgarians, we don’t have problems because of identity, we know who we are, our history, we don’t need to fight against Romanians or Russians. When we vote, we are citizens of Moldova, Moldovans, not a pro or contra nationalist. We are proud to be Bulgarians!’ (B.2., 21, student, volunteer).

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9. For the ‘weak state’ definition see Tsygankov 2007, Verdery 1995, 1996. 10. Oleksy calls it ‘Civil Moldovanism’ (Oleksy 2012). 11. The label ‘Unionists’ refers to the political goal of this group (the union of Moldova with Romania). King calls them ‘pan-Romanianists’ (King 1994), Oleksy ‘Pan-Romanists’ (Oleksy 2012), Danero Iglesias and Protsyk ‘Romanianists’ (Danero Iglesias 2013, Protsyk 2007). 12. Knott shows spectacularly the complexity of identity categories in Moldova, although her categories are debatable – either due to their labels (‘organic’, etc.) or either due to underrating ‘ethnic Moldovanism’ in her study. 13. Concerning the ethnic composition of territory between Prut and Dniester not long after the Russian annexation, the majority of population was estimated as Romanian-speaking (King 2002:19). In 1897, the Romanian-speaking population of the region formed at least 47.6 per cent, while the Ukrainians 19.6 per cent, the Russians (Eastern Slavs) 8 per cent, the Jews 11.8 per cent, the Bulgarians 5.3 per cent, etc., with Jewish- and Russian-dominated cities (King 2002:23). In 1930, the Romanians made up 56.2 per cent of Bessarabia’s population, the Ukrainians 11 per cent, the Russians 12.3 per cent, the Jews 7.2 per cent, etc., but only 31.5 per cent of the urban population (Livezeanu 1995: 92). In 1989, the Romanian-speaking Moldovans formed 64.5 per cent of the population of the Moldavian SSR, the Ukrainians 13.8 per cent, the Russians 13 per cent, the Gagauz 3.5 per cent. In 2004 (together with Transnistria), the Moldovans made up 70 per cent, the Ukrainians 11.28 per cent, the Russians 9.34 per cent, the Gagauz 3.88 per cent (without Transnistria, the Moldovans: 75.8 per cent, the Romanians: 2.2 per cent, the Ukrainians: 8.4 per cent, the Russians: 5.9 per cent, the Gagauz: 4.4 per cent) For more details see: Protsyk 2007, Appendix I. 14. According to different studies non-Romanian speaking Moldovan citizens do not necessarily identify automatically with their ‘mother-countries’. A poll from 2006 suggests that more than half (56 per cent and respectively almost 60 per cent) of the ethnic Russian and Ukrainian respondents are ‘proud’ or ‘very proud’ of being a Moldovan citizen (see Protsyk, 2007). Another complex analysis of the phenomena is given by Marlene Laruelle, 2015. 15. Igor Cas¸u identifies three stages of identity politics in the Republic of Moldova between 1989– 2008: the ascension of ‘revolutionary, militant’ Romanian nationalism (1989– 94), the years when identity politics were suppressed (1994 – 2001) and, finally, the period after 2001, when the government made an attempt to transform ‘ethnic Moldovanism’ from the level of ‘party ideology to the level of state ideology’ (Cas¸u 2008:67 – 9). Since the downfall of the communists led by Vladimir Voronin in 2009, the ideology of ‘civic Moldovanism’ competes with the unionist ideology (to unite Moldova with Romania) among the governing coalitions (Oleksy, 2012:131 –4). 16. The column was placed in the ‘Russian’ neighbourhood of the city Botanica. 17. In 1930, 36 per cent of the city was Jewish.

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18. See, for example: Vitalie Hadei, ‘Blasphemy. The Victims of Fascism jammed by Mercedes-Benz’. Ziarul Nat¸ional, 3 May 2015: ,http://ziarulnational.md/ blasfemie-victimele-fascismului-inghesuite-de-mercedez-benz/. 19. Marshal Ion Antonescu, leader of Romania between 1940 – 4, regained Bessarabia temporarily from the Soviet Union. 20. See Law nr. 3465 from 1 September 1989 concerning the languages used on the territory of the Soviet Republic of Moldova: ,http://lex.justice.md/index.php? action¼ view&view ¼ doc&lang ¼ 1&id ¼312813 . . See also King, 2002: 134– 5, Cimpoes¸u, 2010:35 – 8. The third paragraph of the Law defines Russian as another ‘language to connect nations’ besides Romanian. The thirteenth paragraph of the constitution which was adopted in 1994 defines ‘Moldovan’ language as the official state language, but it guarantees the right to preserve, develop and use other languages – like Russian – as well. See the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova: ,http://lex.justice.md/document_rom.php? id¼44B9F30E:7AC17731 .. 21. ‘He is a Romanian, you can’t trust him. We gave an opportunity for our daughter to break out from this country, she could go to St. Petersburg to study, but she came back and started a life with a Romanian. We are disappointed, we felt she had a cultural background, a status quo, but everything goes to dust’. (R6, 76, retired) 22. ‘It is de facto the second official language of the country’. see King, 2002: 173 and Ciscel, 2006:584. 23. This distinction has proved to have such serious consequences in everyday life that it was suggested to use numbers (standing for different districts), thus for Chis¸ina˘u there would be used number 1 instead of its abbreviation.

CHAPTER 3 TEACHING THE NATIONAL THROUGH GEOGRAPHY AND NATURE:BANAL NATIONALISM IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN SERBIA AND CROATIA Tamara Pavasovic´ Trosˇt

Introduction Children learn about and are socialised into national and ethnic identities through a variety of channels, which can, but need not, be explicitly nationalistic in character. Most research examining how national identities are transmitted to youth focus on overt messages teaching what scholars call ‘hot’ or ‘blatant’ nationalism: lessons about what it means to be a member of one’s nation and ethnic group and its position towards Others, such as those found in history textbooks. Leaders, politicians and elites invest great effort into propagating official symbols and revising national history to fit current needs and state-sponsored celebrations, holidays and commemorations serve a similar purpose. As such, particularly in post-conflict areas such as the Western Balkans, literature examining the role of history textbooks, collective memory and memorialisation and the influence of how the past is remembered in the present – all features of ‘hot’ nationalism – has flourished in the past several decades. Yet, children are exposed to a

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variety of more subtle messages about the nation through other venues, such as geography, music and arts lessons, as well as discussions about current events such as sports competitions, the environment, tourism and popular culture, which are typically excluded from traditional nationalism and ethnic construction literature. Scholars of so-called ‘banal nationalism’ have highlighted the unconscious and ‘mindless’ acts through which nationalism is communicated in everyday life (Billig 1995), while the related field of ‘everyday nationalism’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008) has pointed to the importance of national identity processes at the level ‘below’ of mundane life. Both of these approaches have emphasised the significance and urgency of studying these everyday forms of nationalism and national identity. Whereas schools are also important sites of banal nationalism through non-national subjects, they are nonetheless generally considered domains of ‘hot nationalism’ and typically studied for their perpetuation of national symbols and history through national history education and official commemorations and state holidays. In this chapter, I attempt to bridge this gap by looking at how education of non-national subjects such as geography implicitly or explicitly instil particular ideas of national identity in youth. The research thus lies at the intersection of the ‘banal nationalism’ and ‘everyday nationalism’ literatures, both of which aim to turn attention away from the purposeful, deliberate indoctrination of youth into particular nationalist ideas and instead towards the more implicit, everyday forms of nationalising everyday life. Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’ was originally applied to consolidated democracies (‘established’ nations) where nationalism becomes absorbed into the environment through flags, stamps, street names and subtle ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ distinctions, all of which serve as unconscious reminders of nation belonging (1995:41 –2). Relatedly, the field of ‘everyday nationalism’ follows the ‘nationalism from below’ approach first introduced by Hobsbawm (1991) and Brubaker (2004), pointing to the necessity of studying ‘the actual practices through which ordinary people engage and enact (and ignore and deflect) nationhood and nationalism in the varied contexts of their everyday lives’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008:537). The two approaches are necessarily related, as research has demonstrated the disparate ways in which exemplars of ‘banal nationalism’ are received and consumed, pointing to the importance of studying them within

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their everyday, localised contexts (Jones and Merriman 2009; see also the debate between Billig and Skey in Skey 2009). Indeed, the connection between nationalism and school subjects such as geography and nature and society warrant additional attention. Geography in particular defines notions of place, space and territory, all of which are critical in the imagination of nationhood and nationalist politics (Brubaker, in Sturm and Bauch 2010:186) and can instil longlasting perceptions of one’s nationhood among youth. Scholars have pointed to the relevance of political geography in instilling national identities and ideologies among students and discussions on the relationship between the teaching of geography and nationalism abound (Bar-gal 1994, Post 2007, Raento 2010, Schlosser et al. 2011). In addition to topics of borders and territory, the natural environment also plays an important role, ‘not only to naturalize the connection between nation and territory, but also visually to communicate and reinforce identity with the nation’ (Agnew 2004:233). Similarly, the landscape and national landscape imagery can naturalise certain images into a national narrative, providing cues of what the nation is: it naturalises particular images into the narrative and over time, these images elicit shared values and meanings (Ha¨yrynen 2000, Daniels 1993, Schama 1996). Studies examining geography textbooks have shown how the use of maps and images can establish a particular narrative (such as a narrative of ‘pathological territorial nationalism’ or perpetual territory loss despite inalienable rights to an imaginary territory, in the case of Argentinian textbooks; Escude´ 1988), as well an instil representations of other countries and other peoples (for instance, representations of Asia and Asians in US geography textbooks; Hong 2009). In line with the approaches outlined, and drawing upon previous ethnographic research with youth, I examine how youth in primary schools are taught about non-national subjects such as geography and how the nation is nonetheless defined through domains not typically considered as sites of ‘hot nationalism’. I focus on two post-Yugoslav countries – Serbia and Croatia – which represent an interesting comparison as they both experienced significant shifts in identity discourse over the last three decades, from Communism through ethnic war through democracy, allowing us to observe their experiments with national identity reconstruction over time and place, shedding

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light on a process of national identity ‘rediscovering’ (Zerubavel 1995, Schwartz and Shuman 2005, Olick 2007). More importantly, both countries are still struggling to deal with the legacy of the authoritarian and antidemocratic nationalistic discourse of the 1990s and have undergone this transformation with mixed results. Whereas in Serbia the focus has been on traditional national identity symbols such as historical events, leaders and battles and Serbian youth have difficultly expressing national identity without resorting to ‘blatant’ nationalist symbols, drawing pride exclusively from the past, Croatian youth are increasingly conceiving their national identity in non-nationalist terms, such as pride for the seaside and clean air and base their source of national pride in the present (Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2012). In addition to the different historical context – the outcomes of the wars and politics of the 1990s, explored elsewhere – research has demonstrated that a part of this discrepancy is the complete co-option of traditional historical symbols and imagery by nationalists in Serbia, leaving the liberal or civic-minded populace without a basis for ‘traditional’ national ethnic identity (Rossi 2009), whereas Croatia has gone through a process of ‘identity convergence’ between the Croatian and European norms, values and identities (Subotic´ 2011). In order to examine how non-national subjects might be informing national identities of youth, I focus primarily on ‘top’-level identity messages, found in geography and nature and society textbooks, only briefly discussing how youth actually talk about their identities on the ground (‘bottom’-level discourse). In the following sections, I first provide background to the case studies and the methodology utilised for the study, followed by an in-depth examination the content of Nature and Society and Geography textbooks currently used in Serbia and Croatia in fourth and eighth grade.

Methodology The process of creating new states following Yugoslavia’s ethnic wars of the 1990s was naturally accompanied by the re-writing of history in support of the new nation-building narratives in each country. These transformations are reflected in history textbooks, which have been extensively studied as sources of blatant lectures in ‘hot nationalism’ – ideological messages about what happened in the country’s past, the ways

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in which the past should be remembered and who belongs to the ‘nation’ and who does not (Stojanovic´ 2004; Koren and Baranovic´ 2009; Koren 2015; Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2017).1 Both countries went through a process of extreme ethno-nationalism during the 1990s, which somewhat lessened post-2000 with the election of new democratic governments, as well as with pressure from international organisations to gradually eliminate overtly nationalistic and normative text from textbooks. In Croatia, the textbook market began opening in 2000, while in Serbia this move happened in 2010, meaning that now, up to four or five alternative textbooks are offered for each subject and there is no longer just one ‘official’ textbook for the entire country. The language and tone in these new textbooks is markedly less overtly nationalistic, with the various textbook ‘versions’ offering more or less nationalistic content (the choice of which textbook is used is made by the teacher or school).2 In this chapter, instead of the traditional focus on history textbooks, I instead rely on geography and nature and science textbooks. I analyse textbooks used in the current school year in the fourth grade (Nature and Society) and eighth grade (Geography) in Serbia and Croatia. Schooling is still centralised in both countries following a similar curriculum structure, meaning that students go through the same topics at the same time. The first time students are introduced to topics of national relevance is in the class called ‘Nature and Society’ (Priroda i drusˇtvo), when they learn about national borders, national symbols and national history, though supposedly under the pretext of a non-nature science/society curriculum. This course is deliberately broad and covers brief introductions to an extensive range of topics, including units on land, water, the sun, flora and fauna, the human body, history, the country’s landscape, cities, cultural and historical landmarks, etc. In Croatia, the second half of the textbook is devoted to covering the natural resources, economy, towns and historical and cultural landmarks of each of the four regions of Croatia, while in Serbia, a greater emphasis is placed on nature broadly, natural phenomena, elementary physics and chemistry, the human body and basic health; with the second half also covering Serbian geography. The next time youth in Serbia and Croatia are exposed to topics of national relevance is in eighth grade: both through a designated history class and in a geography class. Eighth-grade geography textbooks include important messages about the nation and national identity, though less overtly than in history textbooks: they discuss borders, physical and geographical distinctions of regions, basics of

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economy, climate, tourism, population, flora and fauna and natural and cultural heritage. In order to systematically analyse the content in these textbooks, I surveyed all of the Nature and Society and Geography textbooks in use for the 2016–17 school year, for a total of fourteen textbooks.3 The two countries have similar textbook publishing processes – as noted previously, the textbook markets are open, meaning that several different publishers offer different ‘versions’ of the same textbooks, though all follow the same government-mandated curriculum and must be approved by the Ministry of Education. In practice, this usually means around three to five publishers: each country’s former state-owned publishers – Sˇkolska knjiga in Croatia and Zavod za udzˇbenike in Serbia – and several smaller ones (in Zagreb, these are Alfa and Profil, while in Serbia they include Klett, Bigz, Freska, Novi Logos and several smaller publishers with limited circulation). As they follow the same curriculum and go through a rigorous assessment at the Ministry of Education, differences between the various publishers’ editions cannot be significant, but are nonetheless noticeable: as reviewed elsewhere (Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2012), the textbook author’s ideological slant is clearly perceptible in the language, tone and details included or excluded in the textbook. As such, surveying several of the publishers within each country allows for a glimpse into the internal domestic national identity debates within the countries, in addition to comparing the content cross-nationally. When examining the textbooks, I paid attention not only to the actual text, but also the amount of space devoted to a particular topic, number and type of pictures and maps, organisation of topics, as well as the supplementary questions for review and further instructions. Later, I organise the findings of the textbook analysis by the following topics: messages about national identity through history and messages about national identity through language, the environment, Kosovo and Europe.

Findings: Textbook Content Analysis History The largest differences between Serbian and Croatian textbooks lie in the extent and nature of their coverage of history. While the textbooks differ somewhat within each country and depending on the ideological position of the author/publisher, Croatian textbooks as a whole spend

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much more time explicitly discussing the 1990s war (in Croatia referred to as the ‘Homeland war’), while Serbian textbooks, with some exceptions, spend extensive time covering medieval history yet avoid going into any discussions of the 1990s wars. Both extremes are problematic. These discussions can primarily be found overtly in fourthgrade nature and society textbooks in designated units, while in the eighth grade they are scattered throughout the textbook in semi-related topics (such as migration and population characteristics), since eighthgrade students concurrently attend an actual history course, so the geography curriculum does not specifically include historical topics. Croatian fourth-grade nature and society textbooks start the historical discussion in the sixth to seventh centuries, introducing Croatian national identity and desire for independence as unchanging and uninterrupted over the past century. These sections are titled ‘Croats and their New Homeland’ or ‘The arrival of Croats to their Homeland’ and clearly present a narrative of non-interrupted inhabitance of Croats in the country that is presently Croatia, from the sixth century until present times (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:74; C´oric´ Grgic´ and Bakaric´ Palicˇka 2016:64; Jelic´ 2015:46; Sˇkreblin et al. 2015:50). This clearly supports the narrative of the ‘millennial thread of Croatian statehood’, which continues throughout the textbooks: the next subunit, referring to the period of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, is called ‘The century-long struggle for preserving independence’ (stoljetna borba za ocˇuvanje samostalnosti) or ‘Croatian states and the battle for the homeland’ (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:78; Sˇkreblin et al. 2015:54). Then, when speaking of the nineteenth century, two of the textbooks have special units on ‘The battle for the Croatian language’ (borba za hrvatski jezik, C´oric´ Grgic´ and Bakaric´ Palicˇka 2016:70; Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:80), which further the story of an uninterrupted language, nation and statehood and the idea of the century-long battle/struggle to achieve these, from the sixth century until present times. More problematically, in the few sentences on the nineteenth century, the textbooks include lists of the ‘many Croats who gave their contribution’ to creating their independent state, whose ‘ideas and actions are invaluable for the Croatian people’; in two of the textbooks, this list, accompanied by a picture, includes Ante Starcˇevic´, a highly controversial political figure known for his anti-Semitism and anti-Serb nationalist ideology (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:81; Jelic´ 2015:53). The narrative of a

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unified, uninterrupted specifically Croatian statehood as early as the sixth century is present across all Croatian fourth-grade nature and society textbooks. The same narrative is present in eighth-grade geography textbooks, only in greater detail: symbolic discourse such as the ‘millennial dream’ or ‘several-hundred-year-long struggle’ for statehood also appears (Tisˇma 2015:85; Jelic´ and Sˇkrget 2015:86), as well as indicating that, in 1990, the Croatian parliament confirmed ‘Croatian several-hundred-year-long statehood’ (Lukic´ et al. 2015:41). As historical content is not explicitly covered in the eighth-grade geography curriculum, we find additional ‘elective content’ at the end of units discussing history: for instance, one textbook has a sidebar titled ‘Croatia already had its statehood partially even before 1991’, which briefly discusses the history of Croatian statehood (Jelic´ and Sˇkrget 2015:25). In Serbia, the equivalent historical units in fourth grade, of early settlements, start by discussing the arrival of ‘Old Slavs’ (Stari Sloveni), not Serbs in the first place (Vasiljevic´ et al. 2015:111; Blagdanic´ et al. 2016:44). The period from the twelfth to the end of the nineteenth century is devoted much more space than contemporary times: in one of the textbooks, for instance, while early history spans 16 pages, the entire twentieth century is afforded one page, with the postwar era summarised in just one paragraph (Vasiljevic´ et al. 2015:130). These extensive units on medieval history include units on the creation of the Nemanjic´ dynasty, life under the Nemanjic´s, the Kosovo battle and its aftermath, life under the ‘Turks’, the First and Second uprisings, etc. (Blagdanic´ et al. 2016:46–65). Interestingly, one of the textbooks highlights the positive aspects of Ottoman history in the section ‘History in the present’: it mentions how contemporary Serbian traditions of drinking coffee, traditional Serbian dishes such as cˇorba, musaka, c´ufte, sudzˇuk, yogurt, kajmak, burek, baklava, tufahije, etc. as well as customs such as taking off one’s shoes and wearing slippers inside the house, all come from Turkish times (Blagdanic´ et al. 2016:53). When it comes to World War II, one of the most contentious events in the region and on which the struggle over the ‘proper’ historical narrative continues to this date, we also find differences in the two countries. World War II is only cursorily mentioned in all four of the Croatian fourth-grade textbooks. Only two of the textbooks mention the Independent State of Croatia, both simply stating that ‘many atrocities’

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(zlodjela) happened in the ISC, without further elaboration (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:82; C´oric´ Grgic´ and Bakaric´ Palicˇka 2016:72), while the other two skip through this entire time period. One of the textbooks skips through the entire twentieth century with one sentence: ‘During the twentieth century on the territory for Croatia, three wars took place: World War I, World War II and the Homeland War. The Homeland War began in 1991 . . .’ (Sˇkreblin et al. 2015:56). Curiously, Serbian fourth-grade nature and society textbooks do not mention Croatian crimes in World War II, instead discussing the casualties of the war more generally. This is particularly interesting as this aspect of the war is especially highlighted both in Serbian history textbooks and in everyday public discourse. The way in which present-day ideological preoccupations surface in these textbooks is in their description of the civil war in Yugoslavia during World War II: in line with the new official state ideology, the textbook portrays the ˇcetnik movement as existing side-byside with Tito’s anti-fascist partisans, without discussing the controversial aspects of this historical reinterpretation (Gacˇanovic´ et al. 2015:134; Kovacˇevic´ and Becˇanovic´ 2016:152; Blagdanic´ et al. 2016:67 – 8).4 Apart from these messages, Serbian fourth-grade textbooks generally avoid any overt discussion of difficult historical events. As described later, the wars of the 1990s are similarly avoided. As opposed to World War II, the Homeland War is explicitly covered in all four of the fourth-grade nature and society textbooks in Croatia. Two textbooks mention the war as a precursor to statehood in a neutral manner, while the two more explicit textbooks call the war ‘aggression’ (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:88) and ‘greater Serbian aggression’ which had ‘the aim of creating Greater Serbia and placing all other peoples under its rule’ (Jelic´ 2015:54). The perpetrators are named as Serbia and Montenegro (C´oric´ Grgic´ and Bakaric´ Palicˇka 2016:74): ‘Serbia and Montenegro, with the help of the Yugoslav Army and a part of the Serbian population in Croatia’ (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:88). The most explicit discussion of the Homeland war in fourth-grade textbooks can be found in Jelic´ (2015): ‘In this war, leaders of the neighbouring republics of Serbia and Montenegro, with help of the Yugoslav National Army, tried to destroy and subjugate Croatia as much as possible. From this imposed war, our homeland came out as a victor’ (p. 58). Eighthgrade geography textbooks follow a similar logic, except covering the material in greater detail. While eighth-grade geography does

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not include history in the curriculum at all, the Homeland war is mentioned in one form or another numerous times throughout each of the textbooks – for instance, in Tisˇma (2015), it is mentioned in sections as diverse as those on Croatia’s population (67), the economy (76), natural movements of people (79), migrations (82), Croatia and the world (85), Croatia and European organisations (88), as well as in cities of the Croatian lowlands (162). These references are sometimes cursory and in passing, though occasionally include mentions of ‘Greater Serbian aggression’ (85, 162), ‘war aggression on Croatia’ (p. 83) and ‘war imposed on Croatia’ (88), all of which clearly portray Croatia’s sense that it was solely a victim during the war, ignoring the war’s complexity and Croatia’s own transgressions. In terms of the problematic Croatian military operations ‘Flash’ and Storm’ in 1995, in which many Serbian civilians were killed or forced to flee, they are only mentioned in one of the fourth-grade textbooks as independence battles (C´oric´ Grgic´ and Bakaric´ Palicˇka 2016:74A), in line with the official state position on these events. Where these events are mentioned in eighth-grade Croatian textbooks, one finds mentions that some Serbs ‘left during the freeing of occupied parts of Croatia’ (Lukic´ et al. 2015:101) or that the total number of Serbs in Croatia decreased during the Homeland war (Jelic´ and Sˇkrget 2015:73), but no mention of the operations or causes of these migrations explicitly. In Serbia, messages about the 1990s wars are generally less overt or are skipped altogether. Only a few of the fourth-grade nature and society textbooks even mention the war, typically in passive voice and summarised in one sentence: ‘In the last decade of the twentieth century, the common Yugoslav state disintegrated. After a several-years-long war, many human casualties, destruction and millions of refuges, all of the former republics became independent countries’ (Vasiljevic´ et al. 2015:130). Similarly: ‘the independence of former Yugoslav republics was accompanied by armed conflict with many human casualties and destroyed homes’ (Blagdanic´ et al. 2016:69) and ‘11 years after Tito’s death, SFRJ disintegrated in 1991 and 1992 in widespread armed conflict’ (Kovacˇevic´ and Becˇanovic´ 2016:152). Notably present is avoidance of detail, which comes quite abruptly and surprisingly after the extensive historical detail provided for the period between the seventh and nineteenth centuries. One of the other textbooks avoids discussion of messy historical detail by organising units according to the

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themes for each era: ‘where and how did people live?’, ‘what kinds of jobs did people do?’, ‘where did people study?’ and ‘how did people of this era dress?’; the subunit on ‘Serbia through the centuries’ includes barely any text, simply maps with territory and pictures of the leaders of the time – both effectively avoiding discussion of potentially problematic aspects of history (Gacˇanovic´ et al. 2015:136). In eighth grade, the war manages to creep into the text, but in a relatively hidden manner: for instance, the unit on ‘Migrations’ covers migrations from ancient to contemporary times and does not mention the events of the 1990s anywhere in the text, but nonetheless includes a picture of a column of refugees during operation ‘Storm’, with the subtitle ‘Forced migrations of Serbs from Croatia in 1995’ (see Figure 3.3). Sparse text on the war can be found in the units on ‘Serbs outside of the borders of Serbia’, in which the war is called a ‘civil war’, during which many Serbs were forcibly displaced from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015:91–2; Milosˇevic´ and Brankov 2015:106– 7), as well as that many Serbs left Serbia proper due to the ethnic conflicts, sanctions imposed upon Serbia and the economic crisis that resulted (Kovacˇevic´ and Topalovic´ 2016:175). This section notes that Serbs owned around two-thirds of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war, but due to the Dayton agreement of 1995, now only own 49 per cent (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015:92), similarly refering to the loss of Serbian population in Croatia, which fell from 12.2 per cent before the wars to only 4.3 per cent today, which is attributed to ‘the civil war and forced migrations of Serbs’ (Milosˇevic´ and Brankov 2015:107). Also importantly, some of the eighth-grade textbooks discuss the Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska as two separate countries, not two entities of the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is also a reflection of the mainstream nationalist narrative and is quite problematic for future relations between the two countries.

National Identity/Overt Nationalism As history and national identity are inextricably linked, the way in which history is discussed and which events the authors decided to include and exclude, already speak implicitly to national identity. In addition to the latent messages on identity, overt messages on what it means to be Serbian or Croatian can be found as early as fourth grade. This content can be found in the historical units as well as in general

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discussions of the environment, culture and population. In Croatia, this includes several themes: mentioning the ‘civilizational-cultural’ orientations of Croatia, introducing the narrative of an uninterrupted millennial dream of statehood, emphasising its clear Europeanness and through units on the battle for preserving the Croatian language. In Serbia, such content is absent, aside from the discussions of Serbian traditions and customs throughout the various historical eras and through the insistence of Kosovo belonging to the Serbian state. Explicit discussion of national identity is not common and is more apparent through latent content. Only one of the Croatian eighth-grade geography textbooks has a special unit titled ‘Croatian identity’, which instructs students to discuss how people outside of Croatia see Croats and whether we are born with an identity (Lukic´ et al. 2015:39). This unit warns about the dangers of globalisation and increased similarity between different parts of the world, in which ‘it is more than ever necessary to take care of preserving one’s own identity. It is built through centuries with tradition, customs, culture and civilization’ (p. 39). Several pages later, after discussing the Croatian flag, hymn and coat of arms, this unit concludes ‘With collective effort of all of her citizens, the identity of Croatia gets stronger in the world, with all her local differences’ (42). Importantly though, this is the one textbook that also repeatedly highlights the importance of respecting diversity, inter-group cooperation and peaceful neighbourly relations, calling the religious, language, cultural and racial diversity as the ‘wealth’ of a country (100– 5). All of the Croatian geography eighth-grade textbooks introduce the concept of the three ‘cultural-civilizational’ circles which permeate, meet and overlap on Croatian territory: Mediterranean, Central European and Southeast European or Balkan. One of the textbooks explains that whereas the first two are a part of the European West, the third is a part of the European East (Tisˇma 2015:23), further highlighting that, ‘Although the effects of the three aforementioned cultural-civilizational circles overlapped over the Croatian territory, we specify Croatia as a Mediterranean and central European country’ (24, emphasis in original; the same sentence with same emphasis can be found in Jelic´ and Sˇkrget 2015:24). More problematically, the map that accompanies this text shows this third ‘Eastern’ circle as to extend all the way to the Middle East, with pictures of a mosque and Orthodox church (whereas the other

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two ‘civilizational circles’ have pictures of cities) – with the ‘Eastern’ circle hardly touching the territory of Croatia as pictured on the map (p. 23, see Figure 3.1). The other two textbooks have similar maps (Jelic´ and Sˇkrget 2015:23; Lukic´ et al. 2015:40), also pointing to which of these ‘civilizational circles’ Croatia’s neighbours belong to, with for instance Bosnia as designated to have ‘prevailing oriental influence’ (Jelic´ and Sˇkrget 2015:25). In this way, the textbooks, while supposedly focusing on geography, make a clear ideological definition of ‘us’ vs. the ‘Other’ and what should be considered the civilised West versus the ‘Balkan’ East with which Croatia does not want to associate itself. Indeed, Croatian textbooks highlight the distinctly European nature of Croatian identity (see also Rivera 2008), not simply discussing EU integration, international organisations and the like. For instance, the fourth-grade nature and society textbook has a historical unit

Central Europe

Mediterranean

Southeast Europe

(Catholicism)

M

E

D

I T

E R R A N E A N

(Orthodoxy, Islam)

S E A

BL AC K

SE A

(Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism)

Albanian German Greek Roman Slaves Turkish Finno-Ugrian

Figure 3.1 ‘Croatia at the contact of three cultural-civilizational circles: Central Europe, the Mediterranean, Southeast Europe’ (Tisˇma 2015:23).

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(fifteenth century) already titled ‘Croatia in its European surroundings’ (Jelic´ 2015:50). In eighth grade, the discussion of Croatia’s European heritage comes primarily through the ‘civilisational-culture’ circles discussed previously, in which Croatia is defined as a decidedly ‘Central European and Mediterranean country’ and is referred to as such already in the chapter title (Tisˇma 2015:21; Jelic´ and Sˇkrget 2015:22). Eighthgrade textbooks also discuss the EU accession process, in some cases even discussing Euroskepticism and reasons for worry about EU membership: ‘Doubt in the value of joining the EU came from the opinion that the Republic of Croatia will lose its sovereignty and tradition and that its entry to the EU can poorly affect an Croatian economy already burdened by numerous problems’ (Lukic´ et al. 2015:11). Nonetheless, the positive aspects of EU membership area are also discussed in great detail, as well as rights and responsibilities of Europeans, such as human rights, rights of children, etc. In Serbian fourth-grade textbooks, EU accession processes are occasionally cursorily mentioned, but there are no special units on the relationship between Serbia and Europe. Instead, the fourthgrade textbooks have units on ‘Citizens of Serbia and the world’ (Blagdanic´ et al. 2016:30), ‘Democratic relations’ and ‘We are children of one world’ (Kovacˇevic´ and Becˇanovic´ 2016:56– 9) or ‘Serbia is a part of the world’ (Vasiljevic´ et al. 2015:131), which include topics of human rights, rights of children, international organisations Serbia belongs to, UNESCO, etc. Serbian eighth-grade textbooks do include a longer, dedicated unit titled ‘Serbia in contemporary integration processes’, where the text is primarily factual in nature: definitions and history of the Council of Europe, the EU’s size and population, the timeline of Serbia’s ‘journey’ to the EU (Milosˇevic´ and Brankov 2015:114– 17); this unit highlights that Serbia ‘has a clearly developed position and political and economic commitment for joining the European Union and all other forms of integration in the Balkans and in Southeast Europe’ (Kovacˇevic´ and Topalovic´ 2016:184). While both countries’ textbooks discuss the environment, as per the required curriculum, the emphasis on the environment and natural beauty is noticeably stronger in Croatian textbooks. In Croatian fourthgrade textbooks, the emphasis on the Adriatic Sea is recognisable already in the table of contents. Aside from the other subunits which are titled simply ‘The Human Body’, ‘Forests’ or ‘Flora’, two of the textbooks have distinctly-titled units: ‘The importance of the Adriatic sea for the

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Republic of Croatia’ (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:46; C´oric´ Grgic´ and Bakaric´ Palicˇka 2016:48) and an additional subunit on ‘Natural distinctions of the Republic of Croatia’ (Prirodne posebnosti Republike Hrvatske), even though these natural resources are again covered in each of the regional subunits. That the Adriatic Sea is distinctly Croatian appears already in the very first historical unit referring to the eleventh century in one of the fourth-grade textbooks: it tells the story of Petar Kresˇimir IV, who was the first to call the Adriatic Sea ‘our sea’ (nasˇim morem) (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:76), implicitly attributing ownership of the Adriatic Sea to Croatia. In addition to the emphasis on the sea, Croatian fourth-grade textbooks also explicitly discuss the environment, with additional assignments at the end of the lesson instructing students to find a branch of lavender or rosemary to smell it; to make a presentation panel about the natural resources of the Republic of Croatia; provide explicit discussions about the importance of preserving the environment: using public transportation, reducing electricity consumption, etc., all the while highlighting the relevance of these measures to our environment (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:49–53). The textbooks also spend lengthy discussions on the importance of preserving the environment. For instance, one of the eighth-grade geography textbooks begins and ends with sections on the environment, discussing the effect of climate change globally and on Croatia specifically, human responsibility for climate change and what Croatia, Croatians and each individual specifically can do to preserve the environment (Lukic´ et al. 2015:14, 230– 4). In Serbian fourth-grade textbooks, the environment is less explicitly discussed. One could say that the complement to Croatia’s ‘Natural phenomena of the Republic of Croatia’, in which Croatia highlights its specificities with natural resources and the Adriatic Sea, is Serbia’s unit on ‘The contribution of Serbia to the culture and science of the world’ (Gacˇanovic´ et al. 2015:114). This subunit highlights the archaeological findings in Serbia, UNESCO protected monasteries, cities with fortresses and Serbian scientists who ‘with their discoveries indebted the entire world’: Nikola Tesla, Mihajlo Pupin and Milutin Milankovic´ (Gacˇanovic´ et al. 2015:114). The eight-grade geography textbook covers the ‘natural-geographic features of Serbia’ in about 56 pages, but these are focused on descriptions of the type of land, typologies and height of mountains, climate, rivers, flora and fauna, etc., without any specific

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emphasis on Serbian particularities of geography. Instead, the fourthgrade Serbian nature and society curriculum mandates a larger subunit titled ‘Man: a part of nature’ or ‘Man: a natural and social being’. This section includes general health advice such as avoiding smoking and drinking, with subunits on ‘Relationships towards others’ or ‘How we should treat others’: this unit describes how we should treat our friends and neighbours, to respect the environment, responsibility towards animals, not to discriminate on the basis of gender or skin colour and to treat people with disabilities and older people with additional respect (Kovacˇevic´ and Becˇanovic´ 2016:66, Gacˇanovic´ et al. 2015:26–8, Vasiljevic´ et al. 2015:18–19). Eighth-grade textbooks include a unit on ‘Protecting nature’, though it emphasises erosion, eruptions, natural fires, etc. and the importance of preserving Serbia’s protected natural reserves, though with less emphasis on a personal relationship between Serbia and the environment (Kovacˇevic´ and Topalovic´ 2016:73; Milosˇevic´ and Brankov 2015:50– 5). The narrative of victimhood weaves throughout both of the countries’ fourth- and eighth-grade textbooks. The sense of victimhood is manifold, from early history throughout contemporary times. For instance, in Croatian fourth-grade textbooks, the author speaks about the historical attempts to subjugate the Croatian language, beginning in the seventeenth century (Jelic´ 2015:52). This line of ideological reasoning continues throughout the Croatian eighth-grade geography textbook. When discussing Croatia’s independence, it mentions that this happened ever 900 years of ‘foreign control’, explicitly including the Socialist Yugoslavia as one of the foreign controllers (Tisˇma 2015:24) and thus negating any idea of a peaceful or desired common state as well as discussion of the territories unjustly lost to Serbia after World War II (Tisˇma 2015:32). The eighth-grade textbooks also mention how Croatia ‘lost’ parts of its territory to neighbouring countries (though not mentioning its own territory gains), for instance losing a part of Srijem to Serbia and Boka Kotorska through Budva to Montenegro (Lukic´ et al. 2015:37). The narrative of victimhood is strongly present in Serbian history textbooks and public discourse as well (see Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2012; Stojanovic´ 2004), but as the textbooks do not discuss these historical events in detail, there is limited opportunity to include victimhood discourse. The exceptions are the discussions on Kosovo.

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Language and identity are intricately connected, particularly in this region, where claims to identity were inseparable from claims to a distinct language (Greenberg 2008). Indeed, Croatian fourth-grade textbooks spend several pages discussing the relevance of the Croatian language and the struggle to preserve this language. This begins already in the seventeenth century, where Hungarians attempted to subjugate Croats to the Hungarian language. The struggle for Croatian language continues in the nineteenth century: the textbooks have specific units called ‘The battle for the native Croatian language’ (Borba za materinski hrvatski jezik, Jelic´ 2015:52–3) or simply ‘The battle for the Croatian language’ (C´oric´ Grgic´ and Bakaric´ Palicˇka 2016:70; Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:80) and include the timeline of the development of the language, the first newspaper, theatre play and parliament speech in the Croatian language (Sˇkreblin et al. 2015:55). A related way in which language relates to national identity is through the ongoing struggle of minorities to exercise their right to use their language (in schools and street and building signs, for instance): a right which is explicitly mentioned in both countries’ textbooks. Curiously, while Serbs represent the largest minority in Croatia and controversies over the right of the Serbian minority in Croatia to use Serbian language and Cyrillic script are an almost everyday occurrence in the news, when fourth-grade textbooks discuss rights of minorities to use their own language/script, the pictures accompanying the text in all of the textbooks are either dual Italian-Croatian signs (in Istria: Tisˇma 2015:75; Sˇkreblin et al. 2015:66; Jelic´ 2015:67) or dual Czech-Croatian (in Daruvar: Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:100). The Serbian nature and society and geography curriculum does not include a unit on language, so discussions of Serbian language can be found only in smaller subunits regarding population characteristics. When the Serbian language is explicitly discussed, the textbooks mention that the official language is Serbian and official alphabet is Cyrillic and mention the rights of minorities to use their own language and alphabet (Kovacˇevic´ and Becˇanovic´ 2016:55; Blagdanic´ et al. 2016:10), though a more elaborate discussion on the origins and development of the language is absent. One of the noted ways in which state ideology is clearly present in Serbian textbooks is through the inclusion of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia, present on every map of Serbia and with its own section detailing the region’s geography and borders. All of the textbooks

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include the population of Kosovo and Metohija in the total population of Serbia and include Kosovo in the relevant nature-geography units, in addition to the explicit discussion of the battle of Kosovo in almost all of the fourth-grade textbooks. Though Serbian geography and nature and society textbooks as whole tend to avoid messy historical or political discussion, ideologically normative statements appear when Kosovo is concerned. This is most notable in the eighth-grade textbooks. Two of the textbooks explicitly discuss Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008, which Serbia rejected ‘and will never recognize the secession of her southern province’ (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015:8) – a sentence that stands out given the otherwise avoidant tone and absence of political discussion in the textbook. Another textbook mentions the unilateral declaration of independence in the context of the 1999 UN resolution guaranteeing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia, such that the dispute regarding the legality of the independence declaration is still awaiting a decision of the International Court of Justice (Kovacˇevic´ and Topalovic´ 2016:16). Regarding Kosovo, the textbooks also describe its high birth rate (12 per cent) versus central Serbia ( – 5.0 per cent), which is experiencing the ‘white plague’ (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015: 72 – 3, see Figure 3.2) and mention in a sidebar that the administrative borders of Kosovo and Metohija do not correspond to the geographical borders of the Kosovo and Methojia basin and actually encompass significant parts of central Serbian territory as well (p. 34). Further, in the unit on ‘Types of settlements’, below a chart including ‘Total number of settlements in urban settlements in Serbia’ (which includes Vojvodina, central Serbia and Kosovo), the text mentions that ‘Many settlements in Kosovo and Metohija in which Serbs lived for centuries, were forcefully displaced at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. This type of displacement becomes massive from the middle of 1999, after the arrival of international humanitarian forces of the United Nations and the withdrawal of Serbian troops’ (p. 80). While this textbook offers no explanation as to the context of these displacements, one of the textbooks adds the following: ‘Displacement of the non-Albanian population from Kosovo and Metohija has continued in the beginning of this century, with the unitary declaration of independence of the socalled Republic of Kosovo’ (Kovacˇevic´ and Topalovic´ 2016:90).

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Figure 3.2 ‘Natural population growth of Serbia’ (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015:73). Key: Serbia (Србиjа), Vojvodina (Воjводина) and Kosovo and Metochia (Косово и Метохиja).

Finally, aside from the units on population and migration, the eighthgrade textbooks also highlight the centrality of Kosovo’s churches and cultural heritage to Serbia, for instance in units on UNESCO-protected sites, which include pictures and descriptions of four of Kosovo’s

Figure 3.3 ‘Forced migrations of Serbs from Croatia in 1995’ (Stamenkovic´ and Gataric´ 2015:74; the same picture appears in Milosˇevic´ and Brankov 2015:62).

Discussions of EU and regional integrations provided in positive, factual terms, stating Serbia’s clear commitment to the EU; global identity emphasised in light of UNICEF, human and children’s rights.

Europe

Identity Environment

1990s wars

Brief coverage; no discussion of ISC, cˇetnik and partisan movement described as side-by-side movements. Wars cursorily mentioned as part of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, sections on migration and Serbs in the diaspora and in photographs accompanying the text, no discussion of culpability; Federation and RS in Bosnia discussed as two separate countries. Mentions need to preserve in environment in nondedicated units; emphasis more on universal social responsibilities as ‘citizens of the world’, dedicated sections to UNESCO-protected sites.

Extensive discussion of middle ages and ‘golden’ era of twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

World War II

History Prior to twentieth century

Serbia

Emphasis in dedicated units on environment, Croatia’s natural wonders, Adriatic sea as ‘our’ sea since eleventh century, climate change and what each Croat citizen should be doing to preserve the environment. Explicit categorisation of Croatia as centralEuropean and Mediterranean; emphasis on EU accession and its implications.

Extensive discussion of Homeland war and Serbian ‘aggression’ throughout the textbook as well as in dedicated subunits.

Narrative of continuous and uninterrupted statehood since arrival of Croats in sixth and seventh centuries; focus on battle for Croatian language. Brief coverage; no discussion of ISC.

Croatia

Table 3.1 Summary of Identity and Nationhood Messages Found in Serbian and Croatian Fourth-grade Nature and Society and Eighth-grade Geography Textbooks

Mentioned cursorily without separate unit.

Serbia

Overt identity No overt discussion. narratives Other identity (1) Discussion of Kosovo as an indisputable part of narratives Serbia or with explicit remark that Serbia will never recognise its independence; mention of Kosovo’s fertility rate; (2) Victimhood – loss of territory.

Language

Table 3.1 Continued

(2) Victimhood – loss of territory; foreign control.

Extensive discussion in separate units on importance of Croatian language and the ‘battle’ for preserving Croatian language. Explicit discussion of cultural-civilisational identity circles. (1) Millennial thread of statehood;

Croatia

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medieval Serbian churches, though without discussion of their fate or current political disputes (Milosˇevic´ and Brankov 2015:129 – 30).

Discussion and Conclusion Table 3.1 summarises the main similarities and differences found in Serbian and Croatian fourth-grade nature and society and eighth-grade geography textbooks, analysed in the preceding sections. Through my examination of geography and nature and society textbooks in Serbia and Croatia, summarised earlier in this book, I point to two main findings. First, the analysis highlights the extent to which national symbols and messages on national identity – where and when the nation is, who belongs to it and who the ‘other’ is – are all very much present in geography and nature and society textbooks, sites not typically considered domains of ‘blatant’ nationalism. The same ideological national narrative and nationhood myths that scholars have found in history textbooks and in public discourse are also strongly present, though less overtly, in geography textbooks, only now applied to natural and social topics instead of historical events and battles. These include the ‘millennial statehood’ myth in Croatia, the Kosovo myth in Serbia; as well as the myth of victimhood and innocence, where only those events are accounted for in which the nation was the victim and never the perpetrator. None of the textbooks surveyed provide critical reflections on geography, borders or identity, though this is expected given the ideological prescriptions of the curriculum. In general, the textbooks surveyed are less normative than history textbooks, which provide very apparent ideological (such as ‘it should never be forgotten’ or ‘we will never forget’) and problematic ethnically exclusive messages (Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2017). Nonetheless, ideas on how old the nation is, who has a right to belong in it and which aspects of the nation students should feel most proud of are all clearly evident in geography and nature and society textbooks as early as fourth-grade and, as such, point to the relevance of examining non-national subjects as important sites of nation-building. Second, I have shown the ways in which ‘non-blatant’ sources of nationalism, such as pride in the seaside, natural beauty or the environment, can serve as powerful ways of informing youth’s understandings of their own national identity in non-ethnic terms.

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While far from a test of how effective the messages analysed in this chapter resound on the ground in the two countries, recent ethnographic research in the two capital cities has pointed to significant differences in the way youth in the two countries understand their own identities (see Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2012). This research has shown that Croatian youth are able to conceive of their national identity in non-ethnic terms, such as through pride in the seaside and clean air, while youth in Serbia – even those explicitly trying to escape nationalist discourse – have difficulties expressing their national identity without resorting to ‘hot’ nationalist symbols such as historical battles and war. This is largely supported by studies demonstrating that Serbian nationalists have successfully co-opted traditional national symbols into their illiberal discourse (Rossi 2009), whereas Croatian youth are able to combine traditional nationalist symbols with a pro-Western, democratic narrative, also explained by Subotic´ (2011) as a process of identity convergence vs. divergence between European and national values. Similarly, when asked about their sources of national pride explicitly, Serbian youth mention non-national events such as tennis or Eurovision successes, pointing to both the void in positive, present-day pride in Serbian national discourse; whereas in Croatia, youth are overwhelmingly proud of Croatia in the present, pointing to the success of the post-2000 Croatian narrative of the achieved millennial dream of statehood (see Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2017 and Najbar-Agicˇic´ and Agicˇic´ 2007). These and other ethnographic studies fall into the realm of ‘everyday nationalism’, discussed in detail already, which importantly can show us how these banal symbols are received on the ground. While not necessarily measuring the effect of instruction of non-national subjects such as geography and nature and society, they nonetheless point to the extent to which non-nationalist terms such as pride for the seaside, clean air or sports successes can and do inform youth’s understandings of their own national identity, sometimes to a larger extent than official national history narratives (Yerkes 2004; Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2012). As such, the analysis points to the possibility of non-national subjects such as geography, the environment, tourism and sports and music successes to provide youth with important beyond-ethnic ideas about their national identity. These findings raise several additional questions. First is the question of the extent to which we can even consider geography and nature and society instruction as ‘banal’, as the lessons provided are occasionally quite explicit and far from ‘mindless’, as per Billig’s definition of the

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term (Benwell 2014). Other related classes, such as language and literature, arts, music and citizenship classes (see also Pykett 2009), could also fit into this discussion, as they are by curriculum design expected to instil particular values in students, even if these lessons appear more ‘banal’ to the reader. Many traditional studies of banal nationalism examine how postage stamps, licence plates, currency, flags and maps serve as unconscious reminders of nationalism, though scholars have questioned whether objects such as bilingual road signs, for instance, can be truly ‘banal’ in nature: ‘symbols of the nation are interpreted in different ways by different people: some in banal and unconscious ways; others in a more conscious and overt manner’ (Jones and Merriman 2009:167; see also the debate between Billig and Skey 2009). As Benwell (2014) points out, the reception of these kinds of banal nationalism objects – such as road signs – is not mindless and mundane and indeed can and does instil certain feelings of oppression or contention among the people seeing them. In countries with centralised curricula, where the explicit goal of all subjects – both presumably ‘banal’ ones, such as geography, science or literature, and explicit ones like history and citizenship – very few topics can be considered truly banal in nature. Finally, the results shed light on the importance of examining both the sources of everyday nationalism, such as geography and nature textbooks, as well as the reception of these messages, possible only through deep ethnographic research on the ground. Textbooks remain important sites of nation-building and provide a glimpse into what and how the state is teaching youth about their identity, regardless of how these messages are appropriated by students.5 As textbooks not only legitimise the established political and social order and participate in ‘creating what a society has recognised as legitimate and truthful’ (Apple and Christian-Smith 1991:4), they are also a site of contestation and consensus; they allow us to assess the interests of political actors and/ or elites in power over the educational apparatus (Kymlicka 1995, Soysal et al. 2005:14). Of course, teachers and other educational officials act as a ‘filter’ through which these messages might be carried out differently than prescribed or desired by the state, in addition to non-school influences such as family, religious institutions, media, etc., all of which affect the way in which students evaluate and appropriate material taught in school.6 Simultaneously, it is important to examine the

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reception of these messages on the ground, as discussed, as banal markings can be understood and internalised differently. Instead of reifying the ‘Serbian’ or ‘Croatian’ national narrative, as in the analysis we would be better off paying more attention to localities and studying place-based understandings of nationalism (Benwell 2014, Jones and Merriman 2009). Both Serbia and Croatia are enormously diverse countries in terms of regional, class and urban-rural differences and an important piece of the puzzle is determining among which parts of the population – localities, regions, socio-economic classes – these messages are appropriated in everyday life.

Notes 1. Most notably, Dubravka Stojanovic´ (for Serbian textbooks) and Snjezˇana Koren and Magdalena Najbar-Agicˇic´ (for Croatian textbooks) and several other authors have continuously provided excellent reviews of the state of history education in their respective countries and are involved in on-going projects of producing less biased and less normative, agenda-driven history education (see especially Stojanovic´ 2004 and Koren and Baranovic´ 2009). Apart from these, many other organisations and scholars have been involved in history textbook research in the two countries; see volumes by Hopken (1996), Koulouri (2002), Brunnbauer (2004) and Dimou (2009). 2. Nonetheless, the battle over the national identity narrative and the ‘correct’ version of history in textbooks continues to this date, with the main points of contention including the events of World War II and the Independent State of Croatia, the nature of the Communist regime, as well as the dissolution of Yugoslavia through the wars of the 1990s and culpability for war crimes. 3. Several other editions were approved, but not analysed in this text due to space considerations and/or the limited circulation of the textbooks: for Serbia, I limited the analysis to seven textbooks, which excludes editions by the publishers Novi Logos, Eduka, Gerundinijum, Freska and Nova Sˇkola; for Croatia, all approved textbooks for both fourth and eighth grade were analysed (seven in total), with the exception of the publisher Ljevak. 4. For an explanation of the various movements during World War II and the conflicts regarding their re-interpretation in recent times, see Mihajlovic´ Trbovc and Pavasovic´ Trosˇt 2013. 5. For extensive reviews of the long list of studies demonstrating the relevance of textbooks, see Apple and Smith (1991) and Soysal and Schissler (2005). 6. For a review of the literature on the development of identities among youth, see Scourfield et al., 2006.

CHAPTER 4 WHY NATIONS SELL: REPRODUCTION OF EVERYDAY NATIONHOOD THROUGH ADVERTISING IN RUSSIA AND BELARUS 1 Marharyta Fabrykant

Introduction Studies of everyday life have been steadily gaining prominence in social science. In cultural studies, the focus on everyday life enables a nonpositivist, empirically based approach to build general theory via specific cases, intertwining numerous cultural motifs. In sociology, Sztompka (2008) went so far as to announce the sociology of everyday life as a third paradigm able to solve the sociological tension between a focus on structure versus agency. In the interdisciplinary field of nation and nationalism studies, an attempt to shift attention towards everyday manifestations of nationality (Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008) was initially perceived by A. Smith (2008), in a now-classic contribution to the field, as a threat to the previous historical focus and the adoption of a shallow temporal view. Subsequent studies, however, demonstrated the multiple opportunities of approaching national identities, and not least the representations of national history, via everyday life. This approach has proved especially fruitful in supplementing the impact of the actual

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legacy from the historical past by understanding how laypeople lacking the knowledge of a professional historian imagine national history and its relevance. Edensor’s extended case study reveals such imagery to consist predominantly of everyday objects and practices endowed with special symbolic meaning for national identity (Edensor 2002). The everyday life perspective helps not only to identify such objects, but also to uncover the mechanisms of how some, but not other, everyday phenomena become signifiers of national identity. Such an approach to nationhood is particularly appropriate when studying processes of national identity construction in transitional, modernising states, where not only the present, but also the past as represented in popular imagery undergoes rapid transformations. Existing research shows how everyday practices serve as an intermediary between national identity and a wide variety of spheres of social life not necessarily related to the national issue, such as political regimes (Horak and Polese 2016), social policy (Bougdaeva 2016), religion (Gulmez 2016) popular culture (Isaacs 2015, 2016) and particularly the economy (Ventsel 2016). A recent study of the Western Ukrainian case shows that, far from flattening the perspective, approaching national identity via everyday practices of consumer behaviour reveals new features of internal tensions in nation-building (Seliverstova 2016). It shows that national identity has not only the usually studied ideological, but also banal, dimension and that it is the latter that forms the habitual patterns of behaviour and reflects the habits of the heart. One such repetitive occurrence forming the habitual everyday background is advertising. It relies on symbols of national identity and features studies of everyday nationhood as a deceptively transparent tool. Roland Barthes’s semiological classic ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ shows how the advertisement of Panzani, an Italian food company, makes use of the recognisable visual imagery of ‘Italianness’ (Barthes 1964). Marketers use the already well-established and unquestioned ‘banal’ representations of national identity – or, to foreign audiences, national stereotypes – in an attempt to transfer the same unquestioned loyalty to the advertised products (Keillor, Thomas and Hult 1999; De Mooij 2013). Consumption of nationality through easily obtainable goods provides an easy opportunity for fulfilling a national duty without stepping outside the everyday routine. No need to reflect deeply about the exact meaning of nationhood in general or a specific national identity, no need to prove

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allegiance to the nation by making any kind of personal sacrifice. Yet, on the other hand, unlike the more mundane manifestations of banal nationalism, such as saying ‘the country’ instead of ‘my country’ (Billig 1995), responding to nationally framed advertisements becomes recognisable as a symbolic gesture. In short, advertising built from national identity symbols raises its audience from the banal, but does not take it all the way to substantive national sentiment. The mechanism appears so clear that most existing studies on the use of national identity in advertising focus on specific techniques that may or may not work in given circumstances (e.g., Prideaux 2009; Subramanian 2013; RiusUlldemolins 2015). Accordingly, such research centres on the consequences of such advertising, including its efficiency in boosting the demand for the product and long-term reaffirmation of certain types of national identity and the ‘correct’ mode of its representation. The present study aims at revealing prerequisites under which advertising using national identity symbols may function. It relies on an in-depth analysis of negative cases – post-Soviet countries where both of the apparently necessary prerequisites, a competitive economy as taken for granted and a version of national identity shared by the majority, are currently lacking. To make the negative cases more extreme, the two countries under scrutiny include Russia, the core of the former Socialist world, and Belarus, where the government consistently relied in its legitimisation on ‘preserving the best from the Soviet past’ (Bekus 2010). The added value of the study transcends the subject of advertising using national identity symbols. The analysis of this subject in non-Western societies sheds new light on a broader issue in the relations between public opinion, business and the state, in the process of nation-building. The post-Soviet region is of particular interest to the study of everyday manifestations of national identity in advertising due to its two characteristics – unfinished nationbuilding and a relatively young (younger than a majority of the population) market economy. More than a quarter-of-a-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its successors still experience the consequences of the Soviet-enforced internationalism and state monopoly. The public debate on economic attitudes and the national issue frequently diffuse into a general and inevitably vague discussion on the country’s future. Unlike these musings on the right course to take, the discursive field of advertisements has clear edges and

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provides a more tangible set of materials on everyday nationhood in transition societies. The use of the post-Soviet cases is also important because it switches the focus from the consequences to the prerequisites of advertising using national identity symbols. The question becomes not how it works and to what effect, but under what conditions can it work or, indeed, even appear in the first place. The practices of advertising and the discourse on national identity appear banal, indispensable and firmly entrenched in everyday life – but only insofar as the society where they exist is implicitly imagined as a contemporary Western society. Once this premise is made explicit and is dropped, neither nation-building nor the emergence of a competitive economy can be taken for granted anymore. To function in its prototypical ‘banal’ mode, advertising using national identity symbols requires an unquestioned competition between various commercial brands and a similarly unquestioned monopoly of a certain version of national identity, complete with a set of meanings and their external representations. But what would happen in a society where competitive markets, although already in existence (otherwise there would hardly be any point in advertising), have become habitual and ‘banal’ for the population? Or what about a society caught in the midst of the nation-building process, with an ongoing competition between alternative versions of national identity and their manifestations? Would advertising in either of these societies approach the national issue at all and if so, how and when? These are the questions the present study seeks to address based on the evidence from Russia and Belarus. The rest of the chapter is structured as follows. The next section provides the necessary background information about economic transition and nation-building in Russia and Belarus. In the case study of Russia, the trajectory of change indicates a shift from initial epoch of universalism and integration via the period of growing prosperity to the conservative turn, making the national issue a central point of the public debate. In the case of Belarus, the transformation has been much more gradual and led to the increased importance of national identity not contrary to, as in Russia, but due to economic modernisation. The two subsections in the main body of the chapter focus on specific changes in advertising using national identity symbols in each country. These analyses show how the examples of such advertising help to operationalise the trajectories of change in national

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identities and reveal various techniques of integrating national identity into everyday life. The concluding section reveals the similarities demonstrated for the two very different country cases and shows that, under the conditions of incomplete nation-building, businesses depend on the state-promoted versions of national identity and that this dependence is stronger when the state becomes not more, but less business-friendly.

Nation-Building and Economic Transformations in Russia and Belarus: A Historical Background Despite their uniquely close links and their belonging to the dual United State (Soyuznoye gosudarstvo), Russia and Belarus differ in much more than the size of their territories and populations. The differences in the trajectories of nation-building and the economic transformations highlight some not-so-obvious questions to be considered when analysing post-Soviet transition. One such question, not often explicitly posed, is what takes precedence in a given country – nationality or economy? In Russia, the economic reforms of the first post-Soviet years had until recently dominated public debate. So-called ‘shock therapy’ introduced the basic components of the market economy, such as free prices and private property (Shleifer and Treisman 2005), but failed to give the population an understanding of the underlying principles (Appel 2000; Aslund 2007). The liberal reformers were later frequently called technocrats, focusing on the efficiency of their actions with little regard to their popular support. While economic liberalisation gave birth to advertising, the free market economy itself in Russia was not promoted. This technocratic approach amplified the secondary trauma of economic hardships during transition. This trauma brought about a backlash that in the presidential election of 1996 almost returned the communists to power. In the second half of the 1990s, as the reforms slowed down and almost stagnated, the debate on the route the Russian economy should take intensified. Having nearly lost the power to foster institutions of the free economy due to the mechanism of free elections, the reformers faced an uneasy dilemma between conducting economic and political liberalisation simultaneously or postponing the latter until completing the former (Gaidar and Chubais 2011). Although opinions were divided,

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the thinking on both sides remained technocratic, focused on immediate and tangible problems to solve and uninterested in the vague idealist issues, as national identity was then viewed. After a quick recovery from the world economic crisis of 2008– 9 the rapid economic growth of the preceding decade started slowing down. It was only then that the national issue came to the forefront of the public debate, embraced first by the opposition and then by the government. The new generation of self-defined Russian liberals, interested in politics much more than economics and placing the need for popular support over technocratic rationality, at first attempted to employ nationalism in a purely instrumental manner as a guaranteed means of eliciting mass support (Kolstø 2014; Horvath 2015). This tool, however, was quickly snatched from the opposition’s hands by the government. Unlike the opposition’s version of nationalism: ethnic and exclusive, the new official Russian nationalism revived the historically more familiar imperial vision and based its popular appeal not on ethnic purity and cultural homogeneity of the population, but on the power and geopolitical influence of the state (Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2016). To legitimise this vision and at least somehow define the borders of the imperial superpower, it nevertheless had to resort to ethnic constructs, such as ‘russkii mir’, ‘the Russian world’). Amidst this new complexity, the long-neglected and marginalised national issue suddenly exploded in the public debate. As its participants recognised, it was unclear not only which economic and political models Russia should adopt, but also what Russia itself should be – a nation state, an empire, a combination of the two or something different entirely. The economic discussions between free market liberals and statists continue as a struggle for influence between proponents of the two, by now familiar and clearly defined, positions; the national issue, on the contrary, baffles with its newly discovered variety of options and inconvenient complexity. The situation could not have been more different in Belarus. Unlike Russia, the former imperial core eager to break with its Soviet past, Belarus, having followed other former peripheries in the parade of sovereignties, soon openly proclaimed its Soviet nostalgia. In the first few post-Soviet years, the disappearance of the old power gave a chance to the only organised political movement of the time – the movement for the so-called national revival. The early post-Soviet Belarusian nationalists at first positioned themselves as national democrats

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modelled after the heroes of the Central European velvet revolutions. Unlike the Central European prototypes, however, the Belarusian nationalist movement evolved not from an earlier dissident movement, which Belarus almost completely lacked, but from, at first, apolitical and dispersed folklore and literary clubs devoted to preservation of the unique cultural heritage and not general political principles such as democracy. After its transformation into a political force, and gaining political power, the nationalists in Belarus prioritised fostering national language and culture over building new political institutions and an economic program was lacking (Savchenko 2009). It is to this lack of interest in economic issues in the times after the collapse of the old Soviet economic ties and regulations that nationalists are said to owe their failure in the presidential elections in 1994. The new government made the most of the popular irritation with the nationalists’ top-down approach to nation-building, their elitist stance and the apparent irrelevance of the national revival to the pressing everyday problems. The anti-nationalist rhetoric became an important part of the state’s ideology for many years to come (Marples 1999). The focus on the economic issues amounted to the rejection of shock therapy in favour of small tactical steps when necessary and the preservation of all things Soviet when possible (Miazhevich 2007). These attitudes gradually transformed only much later. In nationbuilding, the new generation born in the independent Belarus had no firsthand Soviet experiences that could inspire nostalgia. Belarusian statehood, no longer a novelty, required a new meaning, a new identity beyond the preservation of the Soviet legacy amidst the rapid economic reforms in the neighbouring states. The government responded to this demand by selectively adopting and transforming certain motifs of the early post-Soviet nationalist discourse and turning them from remote inspirational ideals into ostensible depictions of the status quo, thus approaching the model of banal nationalism. At approximately the same time, the global IT boom triggered a rapidly growing industry, far more modernised than other branches of the Belarusian economy. The government responded to this development by a series of measures that, besides the habitual attempts to regulate and control, included a sort of preferential treatment, especially in taxation. The success of the Belarusian IT sector contributed to the government eventually adopting the discourse of modernisation and also gave the

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population a source of national pride and made it more receptive to the national identity issue. To sum up, the relations of nation-building and economic liberalisation in Russia and Belarus differ in most respects. In Russia, the economic transformations came to the forefront immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the national issue, over 20 years later, both of them introduced by the government. In Belarus, national identity first appeared in the centre of the public debate, with the economic transformation playing at best a secondary role and both nation-building and economic liberalisation were until very recently associated with the opposition’s agenda. Comparing the two country cases will show to what extent and in what ways the order of precedence and the attitude of the state would impact the forms of advertising using national identity symbols.

Advertising in Russia: Empire, Nation and In Between The use of national identity symbols in Russian advertising has gone through several distinct stages. Initially, in the 1990s, the national motifs in commercial advertising largely centred on the romanticised imagery of pre-Soviet Russian history, especially the nineteenth century. The liberal reformers of the period regarded the whole Soviet period of Russian history as a grave, if not fatal, mistake, a wrong turn that led to an unnatural aberration of historical logic. Pre-Soviet history, especially its late years prior to World War I, on the contrary, appeared proper and genuine, mainly because of Stolypin’s economic reforms. For this reason, the early post-Soviet Russia, so they believed, would do well to eradicate the Soviet failed experiment by establishing a rapport with the immediate pre-Soviet epoch. Besides, the nineteenth century held many other attractions for the Russian public apart from the not-so-widely shared liberal economic ideology. The nineteenth century means for Russians the golden age of Russian literature, the time of Pushkin and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. It was also the time when Russia became Europeanised in its high culture and diplomacy. Although Europeanness in that period applied only to the elites, Soviet secondary education presented this period in Russian culture according to the slogan that art should always ‘belong to the people’. Ironically, it is this Soviet maxim that provided the

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newly emerging post-Soviet Russian free market economy with a tool of legitimisation. Multiple Russian businesses of the 1990s sought to establish their embeddedness in Russian society by appealing to the nineteenth century as a source for historical precedent. Unlike in many cases of nationalist use of the idealised past, the attraction lay not in the fascination with the distant past of times immemorial or an atemporal essentialist image of national identity. On the contrary, the past appeared in advertising as temporalised and owed its attraction not to the desire to escape from the present-day unromantic reality, but rather to restore the missing link and start anew from a point of historical continuity. On the other hand, the prestige of the nineteenth century offered not only a ready-made valuable resource, but also posed an interesting dilemma. While an advertisement by definition has to be memorable, the semi-sacred status of nineteenth-century Russian culture forbade the use of anything that could be perceived as too flashy or vulgar or even ironical. For example, within this logic an advertiser could not send Pushkin around praising vacuum cleaners. Thus, in order to grasp the attention of its target audience, advertisements of the period had to rely on a very limited number of tools. It was this limited number of options that made each of them so widespread. Strangely enough, the most popular of these tools were not the most picturesque. Arguably the most easily recognisable appeal to the nineteenth century was the use of the old Russian spelling, which existed before the spelling reform conducted by the Bolsheviks to simplify the rules and ease the implementation of their universal literacy program. By the end of the twentieth century, hardly anyone but experts in the history of the period was proficient in the old spelling rules, but proficiency was unnecessary, since the whole set of rules was replaced by a single recognisable sign – the use of the pre-reform letters yer and yat’, no longer present in the contemporary Russian alphabet. While experts deplored the ungrammatical pseudo-nineteenth-century spelling of brand names, the newly emerging businesses made full use of the easily recognisable letters in the spelling of their brand names and slogans. It was enough to simply add the letter yer after a final consonant at the end of the word to evoke all the powerful imagery of the preSoviet, ‘true’ Russia. Characteristically, the most influential Russian business newspaper of the period, Kommersant, not only had its name

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spelled with a yer at the end, but also used this letter as its shortened name. The use of the last letter instead of the first one, as is habitual in abbreviations, shows the advertising trend of the time, as well as the word choice itself, meaning a distinctly antiquated, but certainly not pre-nineteenth-century synonym to a modern word ‘businessman’ (‘biznesmen’ v. ‘kommersant’). The pre-reform spelling was combined with brand names characteristic of the late-nineteenth-century Russian businesses, specifically by calling the new brands by male Russian family names, such as Korsunov (a brand of elite chocolate and sweets), sometimes in their Frenchified versions, again referring to the nineteenth-century practices, such as the Tin’koff bank or Smirnoff vodka. Importantly, while these two brand names sound familiar, only one of them genuinely belongs to the nineteenth century. The Smirnoff distillery was founded in 1863 by Piotr Smirnov, who later emigrated and sold his brand rights to a British company. The attempt of his great-grandson to revive the brand under the name Smirnov (here again, ending with yer) resulted in a dispute eventually resolved by Smirnov brand becoming a daughter company of Smirnoff. The Tin’koff bank, on the other hand, was founded in 1994 by Russian businessman Oleg Tin’kov and the antiquated version of the name, no longer used in the transliteration of similar Russian surnames, is thus purely a stylisation. The overt merging of past and present made the nineteenth-century version of Russian national identity, based on its attachment to European high culture, spread throughout Russian branding and advertising of the 1990s. The abundance of nineteenth-century-looking brand names with yers, the usually subdued visual representations, formed a new image of Russian cities that soon became entrenched in everyday life. The situation changed in the early 2000s, when the nineteenth century as a source of the prototypical Russian national identity was effectively hijacked from the new Russian businesses by a very different power – mass culture propagating distinctly illiberal political views. In the 1990s, the imagery of the romanticised nineteenth century of the kind formed in the commercial advertising attracted hardly any interest from the then-intense and highly competitive political campaigners. The Russian liberals paid little attention to popularisation of their views and to the national identity issue. Their rivals first relied on Soviet nostalgia and, when playing the national card, such as

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in army general Lebed’s presidential campaign, relied on an ethnic version of Russian national imagery, such as the kind of idyllic landscape recognised as typically Russian, complete with birches, green grass and bright sunny weather. This image served to create a feeling of comfort, stability and naturalness, contrary to the nineteenth-century motifs aimed at legitimising and contextualising the ongoing social change. These mutually opposed intentions were fused when the romanticised imagery of the nineteenth century acquired a meaning detached from economic liberalisation. Beginning with pop songs and culminating with the widely popular movie The Barber of Siberia by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1998, the nineteenth century came to signify not the Russia of Stolypin, international diplomacy and of industrialisation and commerce, but the Russia of conservative and military nationalism. Characteristically, this reframing of the nineteenth century referred not to the period understandably preferred by the liberals – the reforms of Alexander II and of Stolypin, but to the reign of Alexander II, who first officially introduced to the Russian empire the past-orientation and exclusive ethnic nationalism. At the core of this reframing lay the previously marginalised idea of the mystique of Russian exceptionality and incomprehensibility (famously expressed in the words of Tyutchev, a poet and conservative diplomat, ‘Umom Rossiyu ne ponyat’’ – ‘Russia cannot be understood with the mind’) as grounds for national superiority. The public acclaim won by this new discourse made the previous imagery of the nineteenth century in commercial advertising obsolete. It also demonstrated the public demand for a new kind of conservatism, different from the legitimisation of the no-longer-novel free market economy and increasingly irrelevant Soviet nostalgia. This demand found its multiple expressions in new uses of national identity symbols in Russian advertising. This time, from the early 2000s onwards, commercial advertising reflected the two polar versions of national identity long before this contradiction became explicit in mainstream public debate. On one hand, brand names and especially the names of trading outlets started to include the word ‘empire’ (cf. Morris 2005). This kind of brand name could apply to a variety of consumer goods regardless of their price, technological sophistication and the target audience. Usually such names would refer to a shop offering a wide assortment of a single kind of good, as in the ‘empire of stockings’.

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Paradoxically, this implied homogeneity of assortment directly contradicts the original meaning of empire – an internally heterogeneous multi-ethnic state. Despite this contradiction, this imperial kind of advertising reflected the new spirit of the time. Doubtless, the shops posing as empires that filled the streets of Russian cities contributed to the positive image of empire and, moreover, its positioning as a part of everyday life better than any political propaganda could have done. At roughly the same time, the use of traditional and explicitly traditionalist ethnic versions of national identity grew more widespread. The versions of ethnicity varied from neutral and somewhat amorphous to sharply defined and even to some extent xenophobic. The first ethnonationalist advertising evokes the imagery of Russian nature, the private sphere of idyllic family life or elements of positive auto-stereotypes, as in the brand of chocolate ‘Russia is a generous soul’ (‘Rossiya – shchedraya dusha’). An example of the second kind of advertising is a series of video ads for Vorontsov crunchies featuring the characters of Semyon and Sam. Sam is portrayed as an incompetent foreign or westernised citizen with but a vague idea where bread comes from. He gradually learns the skills required to produce the ‘real’ Vorontsov crunchies by Semyon, a resourceful and efficient local of the Vorontsovo village. The series of adverts construct a fictional Vorontsovo village. TV ads form a series of lessons Semyon gives to Sam on making crunchies. The website dedicated to the campaign provides detailed information about crunchies and their properties, but also about the Vorontsovo village and its surroundings and even allow one to listen to the local FM radio station and watch videos by the local Vorontsovo band, appropriately named ‘Crusts’. This imaginary environment turns a simple product of bread crunchies into the centre of a fantasy world with its own imaginary everyday life ironically combining traditions and modernity. The slogan of the campaign is ‘Vorontsov crunchies. Caring for traditions for the sake of fun,’ which shows the possibility of commercialising national identity, not by offering customers the chance to consume national glory, but, on the contrary, by bringing national traditions down to earth. The abstraction of nationality enters everyday life when it is allowed to become an object of creative and light-hearted improvisation.

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A far more blatant version of superiority and extreme didacticism feature in a video ad for the kvas drink ‘Nikola’, where a circus bear refuses to obey a tamer, the classical image of an Uncle Sam, tears off a frilly skirt and rises in anger so that in the end the roles are reversed: the bear cracks the whip and the tamer wearing the skirt rides the bear’s bicycle. Other video ads for the same products play not only on misogyny, exemplified with a skirt presented as a degrading sign of weakness and submission, but also on homophobia, as when the drink is described as made of natural Russian ingredients and ‘having remained the only natural among drinks’ (one of the meanings of the word ‘natural’ in colloquial Russian is ‘straight’). In yet another video ad a man wearing stereotypically traditional Russian ‘ushanka’ hat and speaking broken Russian with a strong American accent advises his audience not to drink ‘Nikola’ kvas and bases his credibility on pretending to be Russian (‘You see I’ve this hat. I’m a Russian, you must believe me’). The campaign was repeatedly debated not only in the social media, but also in courts of law. In 2014, a domestic competitor accused the company of misleading the public by assuming that the Nikola kvas is the only natural drink on the market. Earlier and more directly related to the national identity issues, in 2005, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi companies complained that the slogans ‘Drink NiKola! Kvas is not cola’ and ‘No to colaization. Kvas is the health of the nation’ violated the ethical principles of advertising by negative comparison of competitors’ products. The objection ran along the lines of cola being a generic name of a drink rather than a trademark associated with a particular company. As related to national identity, cola obviously stands for Westernisation and specifically Americanisation and exploits the frequently appearing legends about cola’s alleged exceptionally pernicious corrosive and destructive chemical properties. Within a post-colonial mentality, resistance to ‘colaization’ is an everyday mode of resistance to symbolic colonisation (cf. Morris 2007:1392, on the similar colonial associations of ‘Snickers’). This kind of ethnonationalist advertising exploits feelings not merely of national superiority, but primarily of identity threat, a fear of submission, perversion and even of national identity theft by not-toowell-concealed ‘foreign agents’. At the same time, this negative nationalism, similar to the neutral self-image presented in the Vorontsov crunchies, makes use of a relaxed joking manner, as reflected in the slogan ‘The kvas Nikola: being Russian for the fun of it’. Moreover, the

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construction of the act of consuming the consumption of ‘natural’ kvas as a fight against the threat of ‘colaization’ resembles a part of the plot of the widely read novel ‘Generation P’ by Viktor Pelevin, an important Russian postmodernist fiction author. This resemblance fits well into the recently popular attributing of the new manifestations of the Russian conservative turn to postmodernist fiction of writers like Pelevin and Sorokin, whose novels have long enjoyed wide popularity among the Russian reading public. Here again, as in its imperial variety, the use of national identity symbols in advertising not only accurately reflects the political spirit of the time, but also cements it in everyday life – a sphere usually little touched by political propaganda.

Advertising in Belarus: The Struggle for Banality Advertisers who would appeal to national identity in Belarus face a problem inapplicable to Russia, let alone to states already finished with nation-building: the lack of socially shared and easily recognisable symbols of national identity. As a very reluctant latecomer to nationbuilding processes in Europe, post-Soviet Belarus found itself in a situation where the imagery of the Belarusian Soviet republic had little appeal to potential consumers of new commercial goods, while the imagery of earlier historical periods appeared in the popular perceptions as neither familiar nor wholly Belarusian. Hardly any businesses dared to repeat the mistake of the nationalist politicians, who relied in their propaganda on the alleged attraction of the romanticised imagery of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania – the state that figured in the Soviet history textbooks as Lithuanian-dominated, not Belarusian (Fabrykant & Buhr 2016). The strange unfamiliar symbols themselves required popularisation in the first place and therefore could hardly serve as an efficient tool for popularising anything else. Unlike contemporary Russian national identity, which exists in several distinct and complete versions, Belarusian national identity currently represents a single field of meanings rife with inconsistencies and lacunae. The gradual transformations of the popular image of Belarusian national identity due to economic modernisation vividly present themselves in the cases of cafes positioning themselves as serving Belarusian national cuisine. Unlike portable goods, cafe´s are by definition tied to a specific location. It means that a cafe´ relying on

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national identity symbols represents a certain relation between the national and the local, between the abstract national idea and its embodiment in the everyday life of a city. In the Belarusian capital, Minsk, the cafe´ Grunewald uses national identity symbols which lack any references to the city, despite its central location on a street once considered for pedestrianisation to give promenading citizens an opportunity to appreciate the historical architecture in a mundane and relaxed manner. The cafe´ makes no use of this historical location, one of the very few in Minsk where pre-Soviet buildings were preserved. Instead, its name refers to a major military victory, widely popularised by the early post-Soviet Belarusian nationalists that took place far from Minsk and even outside the territory of contemporary Belarus. The Grunewald cafe´ owes its name to one of the most glorious events in the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – the battle at Grunewald in 1410 that ended in a momentous victory over the long-term and dangerous enemy – the crusaders of the Teutonic order. The interior of the cafe´, however, mostly features materials borrowed from a much later period – the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and especially from the Sarmaticism – a protonationalist ideology of the Polish, but not Belarusian or Lithuanian, nobility of the period. The incongruity in time and place is even more strikingly expressed in the most picturesque decorations – the figures of the knights that, instead of celebrating the victorious heroic ancestors, commemorate the defeated enemy. The obvious reason is that, unlike the warriors of the allegedly Belarusian Grand Duchy, the crusaders are easily visualised and recognised, largely due to the popularity of Western European medieval history and its portrayal in multiple movies. The mostly contemporary European cuisine does not allow the visitors to actually taste national history. Instead of recreating an atmosphere of everyday life at some period of Belarusian history, the cafe´ offers a motley set of recognisably historical and elaborately decorated items. The significance of this case is that it shows how the commercial product’s positioning via reference to national history can project the construct not of national identity, but of historicity as such. Its attraction lies in the exotic and remote romanticised past – in fact, exactly the opposite of everyday life. In the Belarusian context, this case illustrates one of the key problems of early post-Soviet Belarusian nationalism – its failure to create meaningful links between the past

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and the present. Thus, the commercial use of national identity symbols may only seem to integrate the national identity into everyday life. Consumption of national identity may, on the contrary, become a consumption of escapism, driving all things national from everyday life. This single case demonstrates the multiple disruptions between the national and the local, between the national and the historical, between the national and the everyday and, ultimately, between the national and the nationals, Belarusian identity and Belarusians themselves. Another example of the contradiction inherent in Belarusian identity is another Minsk cafe´ called the ‘Old Town’. Unlike the Grunewald cafe´, it makes use of the location at a historical spot in Minsk. Both its name and its exterior, reminiscent of late medieval towns, suggest an attempt at the commercialisation of the national urban culture, particularly after the early post-Soviet Belarusian nationalist historians tried to create an image of the medieval Minsk as a highly developed European town with lively trade and efficient self-government. The latter was especially important, because for several centuries Minsk, along with a number of other now-Belarusian and Western European towns, enjoyed the Magdeburg right to self-government, which did not exist in Russia – a fact framed in the nationalist discourse as a proof of supposed European superiority of Belarus over Russia. Strangely, however, the cafe´ does not build on this rich material. Instead, it offers typical peasant cuisine described in a countrified folksy manner, with proverbs and colloquialisms reminiscent of the representations of ‘typical Belarusians’ in Soviet Belarusian fiction. This folksy manner may be partly due to the initially selected target audience. Unlike the Grunewald cafe´, the Old Town first positioned itself as an affordable place of leisure for young people. The inconsistency between the urban exterior and the countrified interior reflects a much debated controversy within Belarusian nationalist identity – the lack of a recognisable national urban culture. Rural culture, based on contemporary adaptations of folklore, looks genuinely Belarusian, but is not as prestigious, while the urban high culture cannot be easily traced to any past tradition. Here again, as in the previous case, nationalist historians’ inattention to the everyday life dimension of the past hinders the integration of national identity into present everyday life. On the other hand, the customers are not expected to directly identify themselves with the bucolic Belarusian peasants.

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The folksy atmosphere hidden behind the old town exterior invites its customers to relax and ironically look down at the past generations of Belarusians – a more attractive option for the young people than looking up to the medieval heroes of the Grunewald battle. This case resembles the Russian case of the Nikola kvas, since both show how the gap between the outdated national self-image and the contemporary lifestyle of the target audience can be commercialised not by creating links, but, on the contrary, by emphasising the contradiction ironically. These two cases highlight vexed issues in contemporary Belarusian national identity, which mostly originated in the early years of independence when not only the specific traits, but even the very existence of Belarusian national identity was a subject of doubt. Over the last few years, however, researchers started to speak of a habitualised Belarusian identity, especially among the generation born in independent Belarus. These processes are difficult to trace because of unclear operationalisation and one of their most vivid manifestations, at least in the Belarusian case, is the emergence of new commercial products and new kinds of advertising. One such example, building on the two previous cases of cafe´s, is a pub opened in 2016 under the name ‘1067’. The minimalist design and the standard international menu do not overtly suggest any reference to national identity. It is only cognoscenti who would recognise 1067 as the year when Minsk was first mentioned in written historical sources. Unlike the Old Town and the Grunewald cafes, this pub does not attempt to recreate as many symbols of the national past as possible, but relies on a single reference to the city’s long history. Even more importantly, it does not adopt a picturesque touristy version of ‘the national flavour’, but relies on a single symbol to commercialise national and local patriotism. Thus, the new Belarusian national identity enters everyday life not by recreating the atmosphere of the past, but by making mere knowledge about the past sufficient and mundane. Another and earlier example of the modernisation impact on Belarusian national identity refers to the symbol that so far has proved the most problematic to integrate into everyday life. This symbol is the Belarusian language. Since most Belarusians can at best understand Belarusian, but not speak it fluently and use in their everyday life either Russian or Trasianka (a mixture of Russian and Belarusian analogous to the better-known Ukrainian Surzhik), the use of the Belarusian language,

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far from being a usual practice, transfers symbolic meaning (Brown 2005). This meaning can best be defined not as Belarusianness, but as Belarusian-mindedness. Mastering a language requires a heavy investment of time and effort and in a mostly Russian-speaking environment that offers few incentives for learning Belarusian, signifies a high level of national commitment. It also highlights a person who possesses sufficient leisure and can afford to occupy themselves with not only externally rewarded activities on a regular basis. An attempt to use this symbolic meaning of the Belarusian language in advertising was made in the mid-2000s not by a Belarusian company, but by a transnational corporation, namely Samsung. Neither the text nor the visual content of the advertisements contained anything specifically Belarusian, but the use of the Belarusian language alone was sufficient to attract attention and even cause some discussion in the media. According to the company representative, the purpose of using the Belarusian language was to reach the target audience of young educated professionals. Thus, the elitism of the early post-Soviet Belarusian nationalists, while costing them popular support, created a new meaning of the Belarusian language as a symbol of the creative elite instrumental in popularising a commercial product among those who see or want to see themselves as belonging to this category. A more habitual use of national identity symbols in Belarusian commercial advertising, using a relatively wide range of recognisable representations of Belarusianness, started after a massive state-sponsored campaign promoting a positive national self-image. The streets of Belarusian towns were filled with billboards showing Belarusians of various ages and occupations, with an intertwined pattern of the Belarusian state flag and the slogans ‘For Belarus’ or ‘We love Belarus’. Interestingly enough, this campaign was preceded by several years with another state-initiated attempt to appeal to national identity – that time, urging the target audience to buy Belarusian products. The stickers with a simple directive slogan ‘Buy Belarusian’ and the Belarusian banner as their only adornments soon became a habitual part of the shopping routine. The later non-commercial campaign was surprisingly more varied and picturesque, although the offer of a positive self-image would likely face much lower competition than an appeal to refrain from buying foreign products. This variety helped to solidify the range of national identity symbols. An additional impetus to this

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process was given in 2014, when Belarus hosted the world hockey championship and the demand for souvenirs increased dramatically, resulting in a much more varied and imaginative offer. The need to present the country to tourists from abroad helped to better define the representations of national identity recognised by Belarusians themselves. These examples show another interesting feature of advertising using national identity symbols – its relation to nationbranding. Allegedly, nation-branding should create universal national imagery, which various businesses can then adapt to their specific products and advertising strategies. In a modernising state like Belarus, however, economic modernisation may well precede and even create the demand for national identity. The oft-mentioned idea that Belarusians need less advertising of the Belarusian language and more advertising in the Belarusian language demonstrates how commercialisation of national identity symbols can be regarded not as self-serving and potentially degrading exploitation of the national sentiment, but as a kind of social responsibility. Recent years saw the appearance of products where the use of national identity in advertising constitutes an integral part of the product itself. One such example is the souvenir tea box ‘Belarus in History’. The four sides of the box, corresponding to various periods in Belarusian history, are densely covered with pictures representing great personages, cultural artefacts and the characteristic visual background of each epoch. The transposition to such a mundane product as tea serves well to legitimise Belarusian national identity as stable and completed, with its established set of socially approved symbols. The painful issues of Belarusian nation-building, the search for identity, dealing with contested or morally ambiguous characters from national history, the gap between the past and the present – all these issues evaporate. The selected symbols assume the status of banality by means of their link to something as firmly entrenched in everyday routines as tea. Another such example is the clothes brand ‘Honar’. The name translates from Belarusian as ‘honour’ or ‘pride’ and the clothes themselves incorporate stylisation of the national embroidery not into fancy folk costumes for celebrating folk holidays, but into modern shirts and dresses to be worn in the office or at a party. Curiously enough, despite the well-known symbolic meaning of clothes adorned with the national embroidery, ‘vyshyvanka’, in neighbouring Ukraine, the ‘Honar’ clothes are presented

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and, judging from the demand, perceived as apolitical. It may be due to the neutral stance taken by the Belarusian government towards the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine and probably even more so to the national embroidery on the Belarusian state flag. These examples show that, simply by reacting to consumers’ increased interest in their national identity, businesses can transform the national identity symbols from unusual into mundane.

Conclusion The present study, unlike most research on the uses of national identity in marketing, focuses not on their anticipated and actual effects, but on their relatively little-known prerequisites. The review of materials combining field observation data and knowledge of the business environment reveals the background of national identitythemed advertising in Russia and Belarus. The results show that in both the ex-core and ex-periphery of the former empire businesses implicitly rely on the state-transmitted version of nationality as a primary source of information about popular attitudes. By drawing upon a number of cases from the early 1990s to the present, the study reveals that businesses increasingly rely on official representations of national identity when governments become not more but less friendly to the private sector. In the case of Russia, the use of national identity symbols in advertising becomes more varied (from ethnic to imperial nationalism) and more intense (in certain cases, up to blatant xenophobia) in the years of increased reassessment of the earlier free market reforms and tightening state control in various spheres including the country’s economy. In Belarus, businesses become more enthusiastic about the use of national identity symbols in advertising not only when the national identity issue is freed from the associations with nationalist, but also at least declaratively pro-market oriented, opposition and is approved by the government, with its complicated relations with the private sector. This dynamic is due to business owners’ view of themselves as a struggling elite minority who in contrast to the government are following the well-established tastes of the post-Soviet masses. As a result, vivid images used in advertisements translate the abstract language of nationalist propaganda into specific role models and patterns

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of everyday nationhood. Thus, the practices of consumption of advertisements and products themselves play a crucial role in creating a post-Soviet version of banal nationalism. In bringing national identity symbols into everyday life via their association with products of everyday use, businesses arguably possess a power of persuasion by far superior to the impact of open nationalist indoctrination.

Note 1. This work is an output of a research project implemented as a part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

CHAPTER 5 MONEY CAN'T BUY IT? EVERYDAY GEOPOLITICS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA Elizaveta Gaufman

Introduction With foreign policy being an integral part of national identity, it is vital to study its everyday consumption, that is, how foreign policy aspects of national identity are interpreted at a grassroots level. Given that foreign policy emanates from the state, it requires less effort to support than oppose, making it arguably a more inclusive form of civic nationalism (Halikiopoulou, Mock et al. 2013; Reeskens and Wright 2013). This chapter argues that foreign policy interpretation in society is a manifestation of an (individual) psychological desire for a positive self-identity (Giddens 1986) akin to ‘banal nationalism’. Moreover, unlike the growing studies of everyday nationalism, there are few investigations of ‘everyday foreign policy’ or the everyday of geopolitics (Morris 2016) and this chapter fills an empirical lacuna of bottom-up study of Russian foreign policy analysis, traditionally focused as it is on Russian government (Mankoff 2009; McFaul 2012; Tsygankov 2016). Even though nationalism is supposed to be a mass phenomenon, the study of the masses has been notoriously absent from scholarship and the ‘nation’ in question was usually taken for granted (Whitmeyer 2002;

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Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). It is, however, important to study the way nation is enacted, renegotiated and even subverted by the population (Herzfeld 2014). Because even though nationalism is constructed topdown, it cannot be properly understood unless it is also analysed bottomup (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012; Isaacs and Polese 2016; Seliverstova 2016). It is therefore crucial to study how nationhood is discussed, framed, symbolised and enacted (cf. Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). The literature on everyday nationalism is new and bourgeoning, but already offers numerous perspectives that go beyond the top-down approach to the study of nationalism and identify grassroots perspectives on nationalism, identity and everyday practices. Most authors who deal with the topic of the everyday expression of nationhood draw on Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) and explore this concept from an anthropological/sociological perspective, meticulously tracing the ways in which nationalism can be produced and consumed on a popular level – perhaps even, ‘prosumed’. Prosumption is a phenomenon involving both production and consumption and a locus of social change, often relating to new media practices and having particular resonance in former communist societies (Sokolova 2012). Nationalism and its everyday manifestations and prosumption do not exist in a vacuum; they have significant implications for the political lives of citizens, especially their attitudes towards Others (Morozov 2009). As Prizel notes, ‘[an] emotional, albeit irrational sense of nation and national identity . . . is an extremely important if not driving force behind the formation of [. . .] foreign policy’ (Prizel 1998:14). In other words, an increase in nationalist sentiment correlates with an intensified grassroots foreign policy discourse. Russia has pursued a ‘foreign policy for domestic consumption’ approach (Tsygankov 2016), with foreign policy being an integral part of the nation-building process, as well as legitimation effort (Hutcheson and Petersson 2016). In Russia this tactic showed its disastrous effects on the eve of the first revolution in 1905 when Russian Minister of the Interior Pleve suggested ‘a little victorious war’ with Japan in order to distract the population from domestic problems. By projecting ‘great power national identity’ in the form of assertive foreign policy it was thought possible to strengthen internal societal cohesion – a phenomenon that is most commonly known as ‘rally around the flag’ and is not exclusive to Russia (Oneal and Bryan 1995; DeRouen 2000;

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Baum 2002). Recent developments in Russia show that nationalist tendencies are not restricted to xenophobia in everyday practices, but have a very prominent foreign political dimension (Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2016) observed in opinions on state borders, wars and alliances. This was particularly visible in the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis after 2014, when an incredible explosion of political consumerism was registered, which was primarily foreign policy-motivated (Gurova 2016).

Why Prosume Foreign Policy? Isaacs and Polese (2016) note that the psychological aspect of nationalism is significant, because one needs to create a bond of attachment to an abstract idea. Thus, it is important to look behind the nationhood manifestations and explore the psychological underpinnings of nationalism. Or as Edensor (2002) puts it, there is a ‘fundamental emotional subjectivity which grounds identity in shared, unreflexive feelings’ that needs to be explored from a political psychology point of view. While Jennifer Mitzen (2006) and other proponents of the concept of ontological security1 (Kinnvall 2004; Rumelili 2015; Subotic´ 2015) advocate a move from an individual to a state level, this chapter proposes applying the ontological security concept to the level it originated in – individuals. Striving for ontological security and identifying ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been a driving force in post-Soviet society (Gudkov 2005; Amirov 2015). Moreover, it is easier to converge on a positive self-identity, than a negative one. Consequently, it is much easier psychologically to revert back to Soviet-era perceptions of great power identity associated with successful foreign policy. Positive national identity in Russia is inextricably linked to assertive foreign policy, such as openly defying the US, pushing against NATO in Eastern Europe and Central Asia or expanding the ‘sphere of influence’ (Laruelle and Gabowitsch 2008; Laruelle 2014; Tsygankov 2016). Moreover, foreign policy practices and discourse in Russia are a product that the population is supposed to consume (Trenin 2015) – hence the ‘consuming foreign policy’ in the title of this chapter. But how to study the everyday consumption of great power identity in foreign policy? In this case, the literature on everyday nationalism provides a very useful

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framework for analysis. Fox and Miller-Idriss suggest studying everyday nationhood in four ways: (1) (2) (3) (4)

discursive constitution of the nation; types of frames people choose to assert nationhood; invocation of national symbols; and national distinction in mundane tasks and preferences (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). For the purposes of this chapter, I take the categorisations and apply them to the analysis of foreign policy consumption. In order to analyse foreign policy from a bottom-up perspective, one needs to resort to the discursive arena where the elite-led ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012) is mediated and renegotiated almost in real time – in social networks.

As such, Russian social networks despite the attempts of Kremlin paid trolls2 (Gunitsky 2015), operate much like a rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1980) with its principles of heterogeneity, multiplicity and a signifying rupture. Social networks in this regard function as ‘always in the middle, between things, inter-being, intermezzo’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), mediating governmental discourse, offline consumer practices, traditional media discourse and opinions of ordinary Russian citizens (Morris 2013). A number of scholars have debated the differences between the notions of agency and subjectivity (Allen 2002; Morrissey 2003), but this chapter leans towards a Foucauldian understanding of subjectivity, not least because it operates under the assumption that ‘power is everywhere’ and specifically looks at the level of analysis – everyday negotiations of geopolitics normally neglected by political scientists. In the following section I apply the Fox and Miller-Idriss framework to the study of everyday geopolitical consumption by using data from Russian language social networks. With the help of Levada public opinion polls and recent scholarship on Russian media, I identify nodal discourses related to foreign policy in its grassroots perception (anti-Americanism, ‘Gayropa’, Ukraine, sanctions). The material for this chapter was collected from the most commonly used Russian language social networks: LiveJournal (LJ), Vkontakte (VK) and Twitter. The three social networks were scraped for key words regarding each aspect of the everyday foreign policy consumption 2014– 16. Firstly, I analyse the

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main discursive constitution of foreign policy at grass-root level. What do Russians actually talk about when they discuss foreign policy? Secondly, the most common frames that used by the population in order to assert certain dimensions of foreign policy will be demonstrated. Thirdly, I highlight specific symbols used by the population in their foreign policy performance. Finally, the chapter will show how foreign policy perception affects the culinary choices made by Russians – one of the mundane tasks that shows how pervasive the discourse of national identity can be.

Speaking Geopolitics Despite the reset policy3 and the obvious decline of unilateralism in America’s foreign policy, the US continues to dominate Russia’s foreign policy discourse. According to Levada polls, 82 per cent of respondents expressed negative attitudes towards the US. As Morozov (2009) notes, there is a complicated relationship between Russia and the West that oscillates between attraction and repulsion, where an inferiority complex and the feeling of spiritual superiority play major roles. In any case, if there is one feature that can define Russian foreign policy it is its obsession with the portrayal of an enemy, which in Russia’s case is the US, on both a state and a grassroots level. Most sociological studies point to the rising perception of the West and the US as threatening (Dubin 2011; Levada 2012, 2014). As Dubin (2003) notes, ‘the West’ is a kind of empty signifier with a negative overtone that is mostly used for internal purposes in Russia. Given that collective memory is the basis for ‘invented traditions’ (Isaacs and Polese 2016) and memory itself is an integral part of national identity (Ma¨lksoo 2009), it is not surprising that collective memory serves as a basis for foreign policy legitimation (Gaufman 2017). The US and the West provide probably the most extensive collection of collective memory references. Remnants of Cold War propaganda tropes in everyday political discourse are remarkably ubiquitous (Meduza 2015; Morris 2016). By searching key words related to the US, one can quickly identify a whole slew of anti-American, anti-gay and anti-liberal communities that use visual aids to get their message across. Notably, most of the anti-American groups have large ‘albums’ hosting collections of photographs of Russian weaponry (mostly missiles and

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other phallic shaped military production). In a sense, it is another selfconstruction as a powerful virile identity that can battle the enemy, represented as an heir to fascism and which employs the same Soviet-era narratives of aggressive American foreign policy and Whataboutist4 rhetoric (Economist 2008), i.e., counter-critiquing the US whenever there is a critique of Russia. Discussions involving the US and the West peaked during the protest movement after the Russian parliamentary elections of 2011–12 and then again following the escalation of the situation in Ukraine beginning 2014. The broader media context is also at play: if mainstream mass media outlets, particularly television, are imbued with anti-American critiques, social media users tend to spill over into radical anti-Americanism. The wave of demonstrations against electoral fraud led Russian officials to declare that the protests were initiated and paid for by the US State Department, with former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul ‘giving instructions’ to Russian ‘aggressive liberals’, claiming that the US is on a quest to destabilise Russia and ‘bring it to its knees’. The electoral fraud created quite a divide on social networks, which was itself a tool that helped mobilise protesters. A popular internet meme – the State Department’s cookies (‘pechen’ki GosDepa’) – appeared after a NTV 2012 documentary ‘Anatomy of Protest’, that argued the ‘white ribbon’ opposition leaders and participants of the protest in general were paid for by the State Department together with the Georgian government (NTV 2012). This is a repetition of a narrative that genuine protest is impossible in Russia, unless it is sponsored by the US in an attempt to destabilise Russia. Social networks could thus be seen as a resonator for moderate discourse: fuelled by mainstream less radical discourse, social media users feel free to reproduce a more extreme version that is still in line with the pro-government stance. The monitoring of Twitter yields anti-American rhetoric at almost any point in time, but anti-Americanism spikes are usually visible around major geopolitical upheavals and substantial protest demonstrations in Russia. Social networks actually reveal a plethora of anti-Americanisms and they vary from audience to audience, e.g., in VK the most popular groups with American themes are about America as a travel destination, work and travel, green card, American clothes; but further down the popularity ladder are the nationalist and radical

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anti-American groups that may profess their anti-Western attitudes, but focus chiefly on the US. VK features many popular groups such as ‘We are against the US regime’,5 ‘Group for those who hate the US, the European Union and NATO, who are against terrorist UN resolutions!’6 – again emphasising the geopolitical component in the threat discourse. There is also a range of groups plainly insulting the US such as ‘America is shit’,7 and other more derogatory terms, but usually those groups tend to emphasise American unilateralism in foreign policy. The Ukrainian crisis added another dimension to the anti-Americanism adding the ‘anti-Maidan’ addition to the group names: ‘Fuck the US – no to US foreign policy/Anti-Maidan’,8 re-articulating the belief that the protest movement is paid for and organised by ‘GosDep’. LJ reveals about 2,700,000 queries to a search term ‘America’ and, as in VK, it has a lot of posts about life in the US, while at the same time there are posts about America preparing for World War III, about its ‘Russophobe projects’, it’s support for terrorism and its internal ‘decay’ (‘zagnivaushiy’ – a very common metaphor during the Soviet era regarding the West). LJ dynamics are different from Twitter due to the platform’s blog specificity. Given that popular posts can be listed as the day’s ‘top blog post’ and therefore gain far greater visibility, this is the arena where the ‘Kremlin trolls’9 manage to exercise a lot of influence by driving certain blog posts to the top. The ‘battle for hearts and minds’ usually rages in commentaries on the popular entries that include polarising points of view. Nevertheless, it is possible to observe a certain dynamic in the audiences of particular blogs: in oppositional blogs like lj avmalgin, lj dolboeb or lj drugoi the keywords of the American-themed posts do not necessarily include enemy image constructs on a large scale. At the same time, more Kremlin-oriented blogs yield a more hostile environment; including more swearwords as well. More importantly, verbal discourse of the government mouthpieces is transformed into visual acceptance by the audience: Pervyi Kanal (the main state TV broadcaster) would talk about connections between the US and fascists using visuals showing the same connection. Simultaneously, blogs would reflect and refract the TV discourses, creating a mutually reinforcing multiplatform discourse (Morris 2013:183; Morris 2016:111).

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Moreover, as Morozov (2015) notes, Russian identity as a subaltern empire creates a need for the subaltern to speak. Even though social networks might not necessarily be the epitome of subaltern voices as they presuppose a number of features which ‘the real subaltern’ might not have, such as access to the internet and electronic devices, social networks still provide a public space for groups that self-identify as ignored or unrepresented by politicians, thus constituting them as a subaltern in relation to the government. People engaging in everyday geopolitics on social networks perceive Russian ‘great power’ identity as subaltern vis-a-vis the US that needs to be performed in order to counter the perceived dominance of the US.

Framing Geopolitics What are the tropes and specific frames that the population use in their discussions? As noted earlier, the main goal of grassroots foreign policy discussion is to create a positive image of national identity and for that one needs to disparage or at least differentiate oneself from the opponent (Coser 1956; Tajfel 1981). Fox and Miller-Idriss also note that it is a masculine form of the nation that comes to the fore in everyday practices, commemorations and, especially, in sports events (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). It is extremely visible during football matches between competing countries: during the UEFA Cup in 2012 both Russian and Polish football fans tried to remind their opponents of historical events when Russians/Polish defeated each other, projecting military confrontation onto the stadium (Gaufman and Walasek 2014). This preference for militarised masculinity is particularly evident in the choice of frames used in grassroots geopolitical discourse. Feminisation of the opponent also serves as a tool to underline ‘otherness’. Gilman notes that feminisation was a frequent tool for othering Jews in European culture (Gilman 2013). Given the overwhelming prevalence of heteronormativity in Western culture (Bunzl 2000; Fradenburg and Freccero 2013) it is no wonder that othering binaries were common, upholding male as a norm and female as deviation, not to mention any other gender identities. Gilman goes further to argue that even the notion of ‘diseased’ was also associated with ‘female’ (Gilman 1999; Gilman 2013).

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Feminisation of Ukraine worked along the avenues of othering: Ukraine was represented as a female in need of Russian help (‘damsel in distress’), thus fulfilling the conditions of Russia’s ‘topping’ (Sperling 2014), that is, putting Russia in a higher hierarchal position and at the same time othering Ukraine as non-male, i.e., an inferior geopolitical actor. Moreover, as Guseinov (2015) notes, the 2014 mass media also resorted to the Tsarist discourse that denies the existence of Ukrainian identity, language or state, which is also a feminisation strategy that implies the inferiority of Ukraine to Russia. This is widely reflected in everyday geopolitical refractions (Morris 2016:123). This line of argument is probably related to the phantom pains of Russia’s bygone great power status or its current attempt to be a subaltern empire (cf. Morozov 2015). Several examples from social networks can provide examples of this kind of feminisation strategy. Among the most popular bloggers who comment on the Ukrainian crisis and clearly express their pro-Russian stance, is the ‘fitness blogger’ Elena Mironenko. She compares Ukraine with a loose woman, who sells herself to the ‘Atlantic syndicate of thieves’ and ‘international community of perverts’. Russia in this ‘essay’ is represented as her older brother, who is tired of ‘the organization of a brothel’ in his apartment. The interesting bit here is also the fact that the post-soviet space seems to be described as an apartment that the brother owns – a not-so-subtle reference to Russia’s dominant role among ex-Soviet republics. The kind of narrative that equates Ukraine with a whore – a degrading and subalternising feminisation of an opponent – is quite common also on the colloquial level. Moreover, feminisation of Ukraine can be found on other social networks (see Figure 5.1): The screenshot from VK’s ‘Anti-Maidan’ group (Figure 5.1) describes the relationship between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine as three sisters living in the same home, with Ukraine explicitly called a whore [a taboo curse term at the upper-end of the spectrum of foul language] who ‘dragged a negro to our home’ (most likely, a reference to Barack Obama). Moreover, Ukraine is called stupid for ‘rejecting the family’ and believing the ‘negro’s’ promises about the dolce vita in Europe. Remarkably, the text acquired 3318 ‘likes’ and 571 shares in half a day. This kind of discourse does not use an existential threat narrative or even mention fascism, but it puts Ukraine in the subordinate position and rather serves for self-inflation of Russia’s image.

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Figure 5.1 Source: Vk.com, ‘AntiMaidan public page’ Translation: We are like three sisters in one flat. Russia – the eldest, Belarus – the youngest, smart and hard-working; and Ukraine – pretty, but a total whore, every three years – divorce, maidan, a new dude . . . We have been putting up with this – she is family after all, but she suddenly dragged a negro to our house, says they are in love, he promised a beautiful life in Europe – glamour. In the meantime, we have to register him in our apartment and sign off part of it to him. Of course, we understand that he is a crook and he tries to swindle us out of our apartment, we are trying to stop her, but she is a stupid fool, disowned her family, thinks we are her enemies, thinks we are jealous of her happiness with the negro. Now we are thinking whether she is a whore, or just an idiot . . .

A number of ‘epithets’ about the supporters of Euromaidan are related to the modification of the word ‘Maidan’, ‘maydanutye’, ‘maydauny’ – a conflation of Maidan and Down’s syndrome, yet again a feminisation through a reference to disease. Another insult included a modification of the word ‘svidomye’ (former Soviet nickname of Ukrainian Nationalists), which in blogs often turns into ‘svidomity’ to create an association with ‘sodomites’. A similar technique is used, for example, in the Russian conservative circles in the use of the words ‘tolerasty’ or ‘liberast’ (a conflation of tolerance with the word ‘pederast’). Such linguistic constructions are linked through word-formation and refer the reader not only to the sexual abnormality and lack of masculinity of the pro-Ukrainian ideologues, but the inherent deviance of the Ukrainian ideology. Strikingly many of these creations are clearly the result of

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grassroots social media refraction of more staid official discourse, indicting the everyday ‘prosumption’ of geopolitics. Euromaidan in general for many pro-Russian commentators is synonymous with not only fascism, but also other Western ‘evils’. It is not surprising that social networks abound with references to ‘Gayropa’ – according to the definition by Ryabova and Ryabov (2013), this term was adopted for the ‘designation of European gender deviance and Europe as a whole and even to refer to European values and European democracy’. Although the term ‘Gayropa’ is typical for discussions on social networks, that is, in a less formal setting, its appearance in the official media, is alarming. This indicates the feedback effect from everyday geopolitical framing into the more traditional sense of the public discourse domain. ‘Gayropa’ is only one term used to refer to gender roles in the world of politics. Ukraine is thus represented by Russian commentators in the form of a woman (as a variant of female prostitutes) or a homosexual man, but, in any case, not in the form of a ‘real’ man. Thus, commentators construct the submission of Ukraine to the West/EU/US through sexual acts and subsequent emasculation of Ukraine itself. As Ryabova notes, negative assessment of Europe helps to achieve a positive selfidentity. Keeping in mind that emasculation of Others constitutes re-masculinization of Russia, i.e. following identity politics characteristic of Russian society of the 2000s. This policy has two dimensions: the creation of attractive models of national masculinity and image of Russia endowed with masculine connotations (strength, independence, rationality and others). (2011) The narrative of European deviancy, often connected to homosexuality (a very common Other image – cf. Riabov, Riabova 2011) is not unique to the events in Ukraine. In fact, the roots of ‘European deviance’ in Russian discourse could be even traced back to the discourse of ‘vile Latin influence’ in the Middle Ages, through to the Westernisers/ Slavophile debates in the nineteenth century. On social networks even before Euromaidan, there were many posters expressing the everyday refraction of state policy in the sphere of deviant sexuality: the synonymy

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of homosexuality and drug abuse or homosexuality and paedophilia. Moreover, homosexuality is also put in a Huntington-esque ‘clash of civilisations’ context, with Russia being ‘on the right side of history’. The Eurovision Song Contest of 2014 added to this tendency; Conchita Wurst was supposed to symbolise the downfall of European civilisation with its ‘extreme tolerance’. Thus, most tropes and frames employed by Russian social network users in geopolitical discussions revolve around heteronormal perceptions of femininity and masculinity. Feminising the opponent, whether Ukraine or the EU, was supposed to make them different and, by extension, inferior to Russia. At the same time, foreign policy was implicitly (and often explicitly) likened to a sexual act, where only an active, i.e., male or ‘topping’ (Sperling 2014) position was appropriate.

Symbolising Geopolitics Nationhood is reproduced in everyday life by ordinary practitioners, that is, citizens (Edensor 2002; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). This is reminiscent of the Paris School of thought in International Relations (Bigo 2002; Bigo 2002; McDonald 2008; Leese 2015). This postulates that security is enacted on an everyday basis by professionals working in the field. This is also the case for the kind of everyday geopolitics that was particularly visible in the symbolism around the Ukraine crisis. A reference one’s loyalty to ‘our’ side in the conflict around Ukraine was primarily manifested by the St George’s black and orange ribbon. Although the ribbon became a symbol for pro-Russian support during the Ukrainian crisis, its use was actually popularised in the mid-2000s by the pro-government ‘Nashi’ youth movement. It was also extensively and increasingly used in commemorations of World War II. This is probably why several Russian oppositional figures are reluctant to accept it as a symbol. The ribbon itself was first introduced by Catherine the Great during the Turkish-Russian war of 1768– 74 and was later used following Russia’s victory against Napoleon during the Patriotic War of 1812. Building on its symbolism for heroism and glory, the ribbon was later used during the Soviet era on medals ‘For the Capture of Berlin’ and greeting cards for Victory Day. This too, perhaps, was a deliberate

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attempt by Soviet memory entrepreneurs to bind the ribbon with the collective memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941– 5 and Patriotic War of 1812. During the events in (specifically) Eastern Ukraine, the ribbon was monopolised by pro-Russian separatists in order to show their commitment to the victory over fascism – a particularly successful form of everyday geopolitical prosumption; consequently, it was supposed to show that the political system after the defection of Viktor Yanukovych to Russia is, in fact, the fascism against which south-east Ukraine is fighting. Thus, a discursive string of logic was created: a person who wears the ribbon is not only a supporter of pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, but he/she is also against fascism and, consequently, in opposition to the current government in Ukraine. The use of the coloured ribbon as a key marker for pro-Russian positions led to the invention of another meme: kolorady, a pejorative term used to refer to supporters of the pro-Russian side referring to the colours of the Colorado pest beetle. This designation, which was reportedly coined by Russian oppositional LJ blogger Andrei Mal’gin, essentially serves to dehumanise the Other and to construct the Other as an existential threat. References to insects to dehumanise are very common in constructing enemy images (Keen 1991). Beetles and other insects are of course generally viewed with disgust in the European cultural space and, more narrowly, in Russia. The Colorado beetle, of orange and black colouring, is frequently used by pro-Ukrainian commentators to deride pro-Russian separatists and those that support them. The explosion of patriotic consumption of memes, discourses and images and their prosuming refraction, took place in the aftermath of the ‘Crimea re-unification’. Apart from the re-interpretation of the term ‘vatnik’ [Soviet-era padded jacket] to represent unthinking loyalty among Russians, President Putin’s likeness has become a veritable brand that serves to project the alignment with the Kremlin’s foreign policy. The domestic market featuring ‘patriotic collections’ sell T-shirts with Putin. Most of the images have him in a military uniform, a typical Russian fur hat or interacting with carnivorous animals. In other cases, Putin is adorned with further stereotypically ‘male’ characteristics, such as guns, sports cars, Terminator-style sunglasses, etc. not only affirming his alpha-male status, but also styling him as a Western masculine popular culture icon akin to James Bond. ‘Designer T-shirt’ stores featuring the patriotic collection by Alexander Konasov boast 20 shops

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in major Russian cities, including Moscow, Krasnodar, St Petersburg, Vladivostok, Nizhniy Novgorod and others. Konasov offers T-shirts with slogans such as ‘Krym nash’ [Crimea is ours], ‘svoikh ne brosaem’ [we don’t leave our own behind], ‘vezhlivost’ goroda beret’ [politeness takes cities] and other references to the perceived Russian victory in the Ukraine crisis. The ironic part of these ‘patriotic collections’ was that most of them relied on certain Western images and memes. Thus, even ‘patriotic’ consumption worked with creative re-appropriation strategies, using ‘Western’ icons and narratives, such as Terminator, Godfather or Formula 1 cars. These ‘patriotic collections’ showed the inherent presence of Western tropes combined with the image of President Putin. This strand of symbolic geopolitics also confirms the argument proposed by Hutcheson and Peterson (2016) Putin is the political lynchpin in the Russian political system. The initially derogatory term ‘vatnik’ (padded jacket) was created in 2011 in reference to Spongebob Squarepants in order to poke fun at jingoist Russians. However, in the context of the Ukraine crisis this term is used to identify Putin’s Ukraine policy supporters. As Lurkmore puts it ‘Vatnik is a trope for Russian patriotic sheeple [bydlo]’ (Lurkmore 2016). Even though initially used by pro-Ukrainian commentators, it was quickly reappropriated and is now re-interpreted in a positive way by pro-Kremlin bloggers. The popular Russian writer Zakhar Prilepin inspired fashion designer Egor Zaitsev to launch a collection of ‘designer vatniks’ in order to hijack the meme and re-appropriate it in a patriotic way (Ovchinnikov 2015). Nevertheless, the term is still quite popular in its negative incarnation on social networks: a VK search for vatnik yields roughly a million hits, not including a derivative ‘vata’. An overview of the hits demonstrates that the term is more likely to be used in a negative sense, despite Prilepin’s best efforts. Moreover, a popular LJ community that features examples of extreme Russian patriotism, called ‘Potsreotism’ even features a George ribbon-coloured vatnik as its avatar.10 Creative re-interpretation of the term vatnik was yet another example of the geopolitical performance at grassroots level that was related to psychological self-inflation. As it was impossible to silence the vatnik-discourse it had to be re-interpreted in a positive way.

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Thus, the symbolising of geopolitical discourses definitively occurs via a civic nationalist avenue. The main markers of otherness in this case are not related to ethnicity, but rather to the attitude towards World War II (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War) as the main ritual commemoration affirming national bonds (Spillman 1997; Gudkov 2005; Rutten, Fedor et al. 2013); support for Russian foreign policy in Ukraine was manifested through an amalgamation of the Great Patriotic War memory with discourses of the resurgence of Russian great-power status pursued by President Putin.

Eating Geopolitics What could be a more mundane and daily task than deciding what to eat? Even as children people are exposed to geopolitical discourses via food and foodways. We are encouraged to eat porridge in kindergarten because ‘children in Africa are starving’; nations are disparaged geopolitically through food associations: France’s refusal to support the American invasion of Iraq led to the renaming of ‘French fries’ as ‘Freedom Fries’ in Congressional cafeterias and the French were called ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’. Thus, food and geopolitics frequently intersect. The condemning of foreign food in an attempt to bolster certain political decisions is by no means a new strategy. Russians are familiar with ‘surgical strikes’ of specific food sanctions proposed by the former Chief Sanitary Inspector Gennady Onishchenko that were officially imposed for health reasons but almost always came on the heels of political decisions taken by targeted countries. These bans for ‘health reasons’ (e.g., of Georgian wines or Ukrainian products) earned Onishchenko the title ‘Okhrenishchenko’ on social networks that could roughly be translated as a person who [fucking] lost his mind. This time, however, food sanctions were not disguised by charges of ‘low hygiene standards’ in the countries of origin. After EU sanctions against Russia in summer 2014 connected to the shooting down of the Malaysian passenger flight over Eastern Ukraine, the Russian government banned European agricultural produce from Russian markets in an attempt to hurt the EU’s common market. TV reports of crushed Polish apples, French frozen geese or Dutch cheese (RBC 2015) were supposed to show the determination of the

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government to clamp down on any circumvention of these measures.11 A number of bloggers expressed their indignation at the fact that the sanctioned produce was destroyed and not given away to the poor and even launched a petition on change.org to stop the destruction of food (RSN 2015). Destruction of food in oppositional bloggers’ minds was also connected to the memory of the Great Patriotic War. Journalist Slava Rabinovich, was outraged that President Putin, himself a native of Leningrad, whose inhabitants survived a siege that led to mass starvation between 1941– 3 in which Putin’s own older sibling died, would destroy food (Obozrevatel 2015). Similar sentiments surfaced in the comments sections to different news reports that described food incineration (Novaya Gazeta 2015). These TV reports were echoed by the pro-Kremlin movement’s ‘Khryushi’ [piggies] sticker campaign where activists in T-Shirts reading ‘Eat Russian’ descended on Moscow supermarkets and labelled ‘sanctioned’ produce with a sticker that featured an angry bear ripping a conflation of American and EU flags apart. This campaign was widely publicised on state television (Vesti.ru 2015) and print media (Kommersant 2015). What an American flag had to do with Swiss cheese – an unsanctioned product as Switzerland is not an EU member – appears to have escaped activists’ minds. Somehow, the idea of foreign cheese seemed to dominate the whole sanction discourse. Whenever bloggers discussed sanctions, it was the availability of foreign cheese that came up the most. Political scientist Sergey Medvedev even connected the availability of ‘cheese culture’ and political stability in a given state (Medvedev 2016), also reminding the readers of Sorokin’s Oprichnik Day antiutopian novel, where all foreign products were banned and the citizens could only choose from two types of each type of produce, with only one variety of cheese being on offer. After the introduction of food sanctions by Russia the following poem appeared on VK12: You could hear the groans From the fifth column: ‘Where is mozzarella?’ ‘Where is mascarpone?’ Stop whining, Spiritless bourgeois!

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Chew Our Russian Processed Cheese! [Slyshatsya stony Ot pyatoy kolonny: ‘Gde motsarella?’ ‘Gde maskarpone?’ Khvatit skulit’, Bezdukhovnyy burzhuy! Syr nash rossiyskiy Plavlenyy zhuy!] In this (admittedly, tongue-in-cheek) poem one can detect very strong references to Soviet motifs (Mayakovsky’s ‘Eat oranges, chew grouse, Your last day comes, bourgeois!’) and the very term ‘fifth column’ refers to the Soviet lexicon that described state traitors. Again, there is an interesting epithet: ‘unspiritual’, in relation to the ‘fifth column’, which shows the popularity of the narrative about the spiritually poor and consumerist West and its ‘henchmen’ in comparison with Russia Even though social network users really tried to get on board with the food sanctions, craving for Western food still comes occasionally to the fore. In VK there are a number of communities that offer Spanish ham or French cheese. Levada reported 23 per cent of Russians thought they were negatively affected by food sanctions, while 58 per cent continue to support them (Levada 2016). Even though there is no reliable data on actual food consumption choices, one can assume that due to the drastic devaluation of the rouble many Russians simply cannot afford imported food. For instance, a Dutch-style cheese produced in Russia would cost about e6 a kilo, while its cousin from Switzerland would total e5 for 100 grams.

Conclusion The phenomenon of patriotic prosumption is relatively new to Russia compared with the US, where both the everyday unthinking or creative incorporation of geopolitics into practices is well established: state symbols such as flags are seen routinely displayed on residential houses, clothing, food, etc. and a general level of ‘patriotic religiosity’ is quite

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high (Marvin and Ingle 1999; Kemmelmeier and Winter 2008). This chapter emphasised the need to study everyday nationalism; how national identity is consumed and prosumed on a daily basis by the population. This chapter showed that one of the most important aspects of nationalism is the refraction of geopolitics in the everyday, especially in a highly politicised society such as Russia. How do people enact this on a daily basis? As Fox and Miller-Idriss identified (2008), it occurs through a number of practices. The four dimensions discussed in this chapter included speaking, framing, symbolising and eating geopolitics. In the light of the Ukraine crisis, these aspects of everyday nationalism were very visible on social networks and offline, as people still continue to wear George’s ribbon (symbolising), to buy Russian cheese (eating), to blame the US for the sanctions (speaking), while using feminisation tropes (framing) in order to undermine the legitimacy of the state’s enemies. These practices constitute nationhood at a grassroots level, but they are inextricably linked with the psychological needs of individuals to assert their subjectivity. Patriotic (non)-consumption exploded in Russia during and in the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis. It could be considered an indicator that a ‘feeling of belonging to a great nation’ – the loss of which was mourned most following the breakup of the Soviet Union – has been restored. At the same time, it also shows that the need to perform geopolitics in the everyday in the quest for positive self-identity and subjectivity has increased. By showing their agreement with state’s foreign policy, Russian social network users not only cater to their psychological need for a positive in-group identity, they are also allocating themselves agency in the Russian political system.

Notes 1. Ontological security refers to the need to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time – as being rather than constantly changing – in order to realise a sense of agency (Giddens, 1991; Laing, 1969:41 –2). Ontological security seeking consists in the drive to minimise hard uncertainty by imposing cognitive order on the environment (Mitzen 2006). 2. An internet troll is a person who deliberately tries to provoke people online by posting inflammatory statements. A ‘Kremlin troll’ is a type of internet troll who posts pro-Kremlin and anti-oppositional statements.

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3. ‘Reset’ of Russian-American relations is attributed to the period after the election of Barack Obama in the USA and Dmitry Medvedev in Russia and supposed to mean a warming-up of the relations between the two countries that including a new START treaty, joint anti-terrorism effort, etc. 4. Adapted from the phrase: ‘(But) what about . . .’ followed by a comparison to hypocritical US or European politics. This can be directly traced to Soviet rhetoric used to deflect attention domestically from criticism of the human rights situation in the USSR. When an abuse in the USSR was mentioned, a knee-jerk retort referring to a US shortcoming inevitably followed. This even became part of ironic popular culture associated with the phrase: ‘But they [the USA] lynch negroes, you know’. 5. “We are against USA’s politics” [My protiv politiki SShA] https://vk.com/ usabitch (Accessed 21 September 2016). 6. “We are against the politics of USA, NATO, EU and UN! Anti-USA” [My protiv politic SShA, NATO, ES, OON! Anti-SShA] https://vk.com/againstthewest (Accessed 21 September 2016). 7. “America is Shit” [Amerika - Govno] https://vk.com/amerika.govno (Accessed 21 September 2016). 8. “FTU [Fuck the US] - No to USA’s Foreign Policy// Antimaidan [FTU -Net vneshnei politiki SShA// Antimaidan] https://vk.com/f_t_u (Accessed 21 September 2016). These groups and public pages tend to have between 1,500 – 120,000 þ strong membership. Anti-Maidan groups with anti-American rhetoric usually have roughly 50,000 –500,000 members. 9. ‘Kremlin trolls’ or ‘Kremlin bots’ is the term for the social network users working for organisations that are supposed to promote a particular type of discourse on social media, often referred to as ‘50 ruble commentary’. 10. http://potsreotizm.livejournal.com/ (Accessed 21 September 2016). 11. A popular Russian saying argues that ‘Strictness of Russian law is compensated by the lack of necessity to observe it’. 12. VKontakte Page «Kak ya Vstretil Stolbnyak» https://vk.com/wall35294456_1555504?reply¼1556320 (Accessed 11 August 2014).

CHAPTER 6 TURBOFOLK AS A MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION:MUSIC PRACTICES AS EXAMPLES OF THE NATIONAL IN EVERYDAY LIFE Petra Sˇt’astna´

Introduction Turbofolk (TF) is a contemporary music style found under different names throughout the Balkans and in other countries around the world where migrants from the Balkan1 area live. It is a mixture of contemporary popular and (traditional) folk music, often with an electronic component. Variants can be observed globally as a part of the pop-folk music category. TF is an example of global hybridisation of a once-traditional music style through contact with Western music styles (pop music, disco, hip-hop, RnB, etc.) based on the incorporation of new, foreign elements into one’s own (national, regional, local) tradition of popular culture (music). Pop-folk is just one variation of this tendency (others are, for example, folktronica or rock-folk). Serbian scholar Ivana Kronja points out the specific role of media in the post-socialist bloc countries including the former Yugoslavia. Together with political and economic transformations, these countries have also experienced a ‘media’ transformation: a direct mass-media post-modern society transformation, where all the important social relations are ‘mediated through media’ (Kronja 2008:97). This leads to

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various imitations and glocalisations, evidenced by such developments as TV Balkanika (known as the ‘Balkan MTV’), national versions of reality shows and soap operas (Kronja 2008:100). Rory Archer states that hybrid music styles (chalga, cro-drance, musica˘ orientala˘, arabesk) in the region cause ‘moral panic’. ‘Moral panic’ appears as a consequential effect which threatens the ‘national self’ (2009:27). Archer adds that ‘central to these regional moral panics is the notion that sources from the East remain of lower value than those regarded as national of from the West and more securely ‘other’ (and implicitly better) locales’ (ibid). Turbofolk is a very well-known and extensive form of audiovisual expression. It is widely present in ex-Yugoslav societies. In the Balkan countries and within the diaspora people feel either strongly in favour of it or the direct opposite. With regards to the diaspora, TF comprises the majority of public music consumption2 from the countries of origin. Simply put, listening to TF is so common in diaspora that it can be considered an everyday life practice. With this in mind, I conducted field research in Austria in 2014 to discover what kind of identification TF music brings to its consumers. Identity formation is a dynamic process reacting to changes happening in the society. In this book and elsewhere (Isaacs and Polese 2015, 2016; Pawłusz and Seliverstova 2016; Horak and Polese 2015) identity constructions have been widely examined in the post-Soviet space beyond a state-institutional level. Isaacs and Polese note about the post-Soviet space that ‘[n]ew claims of nationhood have emerged, countries have become divided and some national, ethnic and religious movements and phenomena have become more visible’ (2016:1). A parallel reality works for the post-Yugoslav space as well. More attention towards everyday life practices in forming of the national in the ex-Yugoslav context provide a different and fresh perspective. According to contemporary nationhood and nationalism theories, national identity can be established by everyday (un)conscious realities of ordinary people (Billig 1995, 2009; Skey 2009, 2011; Edensor 2002). This coheres with management processes led by the state authorities and institutions, but a significant segment is constituted on an ordinary basis by ordinary people. What is more, due to their takenfor-granted character these processes may be almost invisible. Nevertheless, the socio-cultural perspective ‘from-below’ can be very helpful when examining contribution of people to nationhood and to

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the forming/shaping of the national. Michael Billig states that the production or reproduction of national belonging is made by a ‘whole complex of beliefs, assumptions, habits, representations and practices’ (1995:6). Skey (2009) critically points out several debatable statements in Billig’s Banal nationalism. One of them is the generalisation of how people receive pro-national impulses. This chapter contributes to that critique: it observes a specific group of people listening to a type of music characteristically (supra/inter)-national in its core. Although the examined group consists of a limited number of diaspora members, it still contains many meanings and for each member it contains different experiences, pleasures and reactions. Thus, it supports Billig’s claim that humans are not merely receivers of messages from media and ‘have much to debate, as they bring the topics of ‘common sense’ into rhetorical opposition’ (2009:348). However, this finding also stresses the need to reflect the diversity outlined in Skey’s argument. The national can also have a more complex meaning in the context of diaspora, as the state is lacking physicality. For example, Fox and MillerIdriss research national signs in the context of being outside the country of origin. They examine examples from the USA and Quebec (in relation to the United Kingdom and France) and recognise minor attributes in the language used by people who feel attachment to the country of origin. They add that by similar practices nationhood is ‘meaningfully embodied, expressed and sometimes performed in the routine contexts of everyday life’ (2008:542). In addition, people make choices and so their national belonging is implicated in those choices: ‘People “choose” the nation when the universe of options is defined in national terms’ (ibid). In the Balkan context nationhood is expressed by looking for music and people (referred to as ‘nasˇa muzika, nasˇi ljudi’ – ‘our music, our people’) in diaspora ethnic bars, club, cafe´s, shops, etc. and connecting with anything that attaches one to the homeland. National rhetorics – implicit in the terms ‘our’ and ‘we’ can also be found in Billig (1995) and Skey (2011). This is supported by the language of TF music. It is also widely practised in everyday verbal communication among the diaspora members. Turbofolk, an informal and mundane music style, is exclusively supported by the private sector. Thus, ‘from below’ and ‘banal’ perspectives are obviously considered desirable and incorporate either

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subconscious or conscious imagining and practising of the national. However, the main aim of this chapter is to challenge the black-andwhite vision (relating to assimilation, separation or hybrid-unique identity diaspora trends) in the scope of everyday life identity construction. It is possible to work within and/or between these strategies. Everyday reality connected to music consumption opens up other options in terms of how to deal with identity. It is not necessary to understand it only in the terms of national belonging to/identifying with a particular nationhood. A very specific insight on a micro level is the example of autochthonous turbofolk production. It shows how unintentionally (inter/supra)-nationally oriented song can express a subjective and intimate relation between a diaspora member, the country (countries) of origin and the country of residence (or generally diaspora space). Overall, the chapter contributes to the understanding of national identity construction in a non-traditional way. It shows diasporic perspectives towards nation state(s) through entertainment – specifically music. The imagined nationhood identification that emanates from it relates to a very fragile and blurry idea. Nevertheless, for young people it often serves as a base for connection with ‘roots’, although they might not always perceive it that way. Billig might define this as ‘the nationalistic unconsciousness’ (2009:348– 9). As he explains further, ‘the unconscious can also include what is so familiar and habitual that it passes unnoticed’ (ibid.). This study is based on fieldwork data collected in Austria. Austria was chosen for its relatively numerous ex-Yugoslav diaspora, discussed later. I visited several cities and many places connected to the turbofolk scene. In total, 27 respondents were interviewed and 135 participants filled in a questionnaire. Ethnographic methods enabled work in situ as well as supporting qualitative interviews. Respondents were chosen randomly. TF is so popular that almost every young and middle-aged person between 15 and 40 years would have an opinion about it and therefore there were no strict selection criteria. The interviewees contained listeners and non-listeners of TF. They were approached in TF spots (cafe´s, clubs, bars), at university, on the streets, some of them were found via Facebook and other social networks, through friends, family or acquaintances. The interviews were open and non-directed. Participant and non-participant observations were widely practised at all kind of events where TF played a role (especially cafe´s, discos, bars).

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Specifically behaviour, mood, movements, dancing, singing, debates, chats and other reactions towards the TF sphere were observed and I focus on public practice. Because it was very difficult to shape the findings, I decided to work with the data through the scope of the consumption and practising of TF. Here, practice refers to the absorption and internalisation (via behaviour, usage, thinking) of TF and shows different everyday perspectives including fashion, cafe´/club culture, national/non-national identification (from the point of view of ethnic minority members) and a sense of belonging.

The Setting for the Birth of Turbofolk The first mentions of turbofolk predominantly date to the Yugoslav cultural environment during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The term itself was introduced by the controversial Rambo Amadeus, a Yugoslav singer famous for his satirical lyrics and had a highly negative connotation. The inspirational platform for turbofolk was based on novokomponovana music3 (NkNM or newly composed national music), a pop-folk style emerging since the 1960s. Later productions of NkNM already contained elements of mass culture, social topics, emotional expression, sentimentality and ‘pseudomodernity’. With the turn to turbofolk, the music gained more explicit sexual and emotional references as well as a change in presentation and image of the singers. To clarify, NkNM (and other domestic music styles) did not disappear but by the beginning of the 1990s, turbofolk music had become a synonym for real business, a successful career and a certain kind of a lifestyle. Due to the political changes during the early 1990s, Serbian society paid an enormous amount of attention to national issues and to the increasing tendencies towards ethnic homogenisation. The values of the old regime were decaying, previously stable and fixed media barriers were dissolving and the market was starting to be privatised. There were other reasons for citizen’s dissatisfaction: isolation of the country, international sanctions, Serbian migrants from other parts of Yugoslavia heading towards Serbia and deteriorating living standards caused by stagnation of the economy and the economic crisis. The situation was not any better in the surrounding countries. This atmosphere created a stable platform for turbofolk music as production costs were low. Thanks to the light themes of the songs, escapism to a ‘golden world of glamour’ and

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simple lyrics, ordinary people were able to identify with it and therefore chose to listen to it. In the mid-1990s, turbofolk established a music monopoly over the whole country (over and above war-folk music, NkNM and the dance-techno scene) and started to spread beyond the borders, where it experienced a rapid increase in popularity too. According to many scholars (Archer, Gotthardi-Pavlovski, Kronja, Grujic´), the TF music industry helped fuel the nationalistic mania of the era. They usually illustrate this by pointing to the wedding of the then most famous singer Svetlana Velicˇkovic´ – known as Ceca- to the founder of Srpska dobrovoljacˇka garda paramilitary troops, Zˇeljko ‘Arkan’ Razˇnatovic´ in 1995. Nevertheless, it is essential to understand the atmosphere at that time in terms of the chaos in the ethnic sphere evoked by the nationalistic movement diffusing through society. Turbofolk embraced these values and used them to increase its commercialisation. Turbofolk stars took pleasure in assured financial profit and therefore perfectly corresponded to the materialistic tendencies of the era. In the same way that the political and social atmosphere at the time contributed to the production of turbofolk, TF served to reinforce and legitimise the values of society. The main, recurring themes present in the TF scene coincided ideally with the escapist needs of society at the time and, as such, were attractive to the lower and lower-middle classes. Common topics included, but were not limited to, physical attraction, the naked female body, erotic themes, alcohol, entertainment and sometimes consisted of quite vulgar content. Marija Grujic´ even finds a ‘pornographic sadomasochistic image’ in turbofolk style (2013:91). Songs had a simple structure, a strong chorus and easy, metaphoric language. They were inspired by current events, they highlighted the Orthodox religion and Serbian national traditions and used easily recognisable symbols. Later, in the 2000s, some new singing stars appeared (for instance Seka Aleksic´, Goga Sekulic´, Dado Polumenta, Djogani, Sandra Afrika) and the rhythm in TF accelerated so that it could compete with the contemporary music in Western discos. By this time, it had also spread among all the other Balkan countries, sometimes joining alreadyexisting, similar styles of music.4 Apart from rare exceptions that used orientalisms to a large degree (which could be possibly explained as a self-orientalisation), national elements in the TF music industry were slowly minimalised. However, TF has remained almost exclusively sung

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in Serbian. Nevertheless, national (Serbian) motifs have decreased and been replaced by a sort of collective sentiment referencing a shared Balkan background. The new generation, which grew up in different circumstances and does not recall the old regime, continues the production of contemporary TF. Topics remain the same. Lyrics about alcohol consumption, sexuality and entertainment are still as attractive as before. Turbofolk succeeded in building not only a music scene but also a consumer lifestyle and image.

Identification with Turbofolk Before the 1990s, the ex-Yugoslav diaspora in Austria contained traditional ethnic minorities, political and economic migrants and guest workers (Gastarbeiter). During the 1990s many refugees resettled there as well. Afterwards, new economic migrants and brain drain migration waves arrived. Descendants of migrants contributed to a very diverse community. The majority of society has not often distinguished between individual countries of origin of ex-Yugoslavs. Ordinary Austrians have used the term ‘jugo’ for all the ex-Yugoslav citizens, regardless of country of origin. This term is interpreted as derogatory by the diaspora. Even Austrian statistics represent a generalised overview – they usually consider people from former Yugoslav countries to be one group. It is also possible that the diaspora has claimed this collective identity and moulded it in their own manner, to their own standards. Estimations suggest that the ex-Yugoslav diaspora in Austria has around 450,000 members, including descendants (Statistik Austria 2012). The diaspora has established an infrastructure of cafe´s, restaurants, clubs and shops. The migrants and their descendants have connected with their home music scene and regularly welcome singers from their home countries. Thus the diaspora plays a significant role in terms of the music audience (and the financial contribution) to the home production of music. Everyday music listening is an integral part of diasporic communities and TF is played at weddings, celebrations, holidays and parties. The music style varies, but a majority of the songs played there can be defined as ‘traditional’, NkNM or turbofolk. When people gather in order to celebrate or to have fun, they call the occasion tefericˇ, zˇurka, tulum, fesˇta, dernek or simply Balkan party. A ‘Balkan feeling’ is for an outsider clearly visible in the practising of turbofolk. Listeners

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themselves refer to the ‘Balkanness’, as belonging to the Balkans, through TF. For instance one respondent said he likes to listen to TF because ‘when you see the lyrics, everything is Balkan, Balkan party, Balkan rhythm, Balkan everywhere and everything about it’. One question arises, though. Does the diaspora really feel a panethnic identity by taking up choruses of the songs and catch-phrases or is it just a marketing trick? In what ways can the diaspora relate to this? We can only speculate that the feeling of ‘luda zˇurka’ (wild party) or the strong emotionality bring about a pro-collective identity that could be possibly called ‘Balkanness’. The fact is, that tolerance and maybe even apolitical tendencies are an evident characteristic of those practising TF. Politically oriented people who see TF through the prism of war usually consider turbofolk to be very negative and do not participate in it (shown from the questionnaires, comments in online debates on diasporic blogs and forums and interviews). From the participant observation it seems that the politics of openly practising TF includes an intense focus on the physical body or the needs of the body, hedonism and carefreeness. Other perceptions are likely to be hidden in the private sphere or are experienced latently. Turbofolk is practised by ‘new Austrians’ (secondgeneration migrants), Croatians, Bosnians, Bosniaks, Serbians and other consumers with different ethnic backgrounds. Parallel tendencies can be found in the kwaito culture in South Africa.5 TF events are often connected to important (inter)national dates and holidays – New Year, Christmas, Women’s day, the anniversary of particular minority clubs, etc. In every city where there is significant demand, turbofolk (and sometimes NkNM music) is played in local discos or bars at least once a week (Saturday), even sometimes hosting performers. Turbofolk is the most reproduced music style in the (ethnic) public space. The position of turbofolk within Austria can be explained by the availability of the enormous home production of this style and the decreasing attractiveness of old Yugo-rock. Even young people in diaspora who do not listen to it or feel antipathy towards or ignore turbofolk, come into close contact with it (usually as passive listeners). Some respondents commented that they do not actively search for or listen to turbofolk but they consume it anyway: when they go to a club or cafe´ (or when they for instance travel by long-distance buses to their countries of origin) they are forced to listen to it. They usually presented typical reflections such as: ‘if I don’t have any other choice’, ‘only if

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I must’, ‘only if they turn it on in some club’, ‘if I am out and it’s on’, ‘I don’t care about the music when I am with my friends’, ‘only if I must because of the others’. One pattern is apparent from these answers – individuals like to socialise and places for young people in the diaspora are dominated by the turbofolk scene. It is very common for households in the diaspora to have access to media that continuously play turbofolk. For example, TV Pink, which experienced a boom in the private sector of TV music channels in the 1990s, is still a must-have for many households. Moreover TV Pink and other TV music channels are an inexpensive way to keep track of what is happening in the countries of origin. Thus, it is not surprising that many respondents heavily exposed to the music coming from ex-Yugoslav countries. Examples of the outward practices of turbofolk are seen when TF music is loudly blaring from ethnically decorated cars in the suburbs of Vienna or half-drunk guests are belting out songs in a TF concert or disco. The atmosphere is always very emotional and people feel a strong sense of camaraderie. The entertainment and emotional factor is usually strengthened by the amount of alcohol drunk. Connection to TF can be significantly tied to physical features and body sensitivity. This physicality relates mainly to dance, alcohol drinking, general enjoyment, loud music and close contact between the sexes – to TF clubbing and hedonistic identity (including the purported ‘Balkan mentality’ framework: ‘samo polako’, ‘nema problema’, etc.). According to respondents, at a TF party, one can experience great fun, the music is joyful, the rhythm is quick enough to dance and visitors are drunk and happy. The atmosphere is carefree, relaxed, without any barriers or rules (‘I love to go to Balkan parties because there are not many rules, it is chaotic, the best party!’, ‘I feel incredible there’, ‘When you hear it [TF music], you start to sing immediately.’ ‘Relax . . . enjoying’). Some respondents boasted that they go to the TF party to get drunk. This clubbing relation is dominant among young consumers, whereas some older ones visit these places less often as they move on to another life phase (‘Sometimes I feel old, the music is about the same thing all the time, for example drunkenness and that some woman looks good so that you can go with her’.) We can add the motifs of forgetting everyday problems and escaping inferior minority feelings to the attractions of TF. As one informant stated, many of visitors have very low self-esteem, but this changes ‘180 degrees with entrance to the party’.

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When reflecting on consuming TF, some listeners emphasised that they listen to it ‘just for fun’ and it does not mean anything particular to them or to their identity. They sometimes confirmed that on the contrary, the sevdah or rock music they listen to affects their identity and not TF (‘Yes it does, I recall the homeland while listening to sevdah’.).6 Others highlighted the opposite – they listen to turbofolk because for them it is a part of national identity (‘it [TF] means to me a lot, I feel like I am at home and I miss it!’). University students more often mentioned national or cultural identity (for example, one informant who listens to TF regularly once a week in the clubs, alludes to the experiential characteristics and relation to the country of origin – ‘When I listen to our music, it has a lot to do with cultural and national identity. Remembering childhood, because my parents listened to it too, when I was little. When I listen to the foreign music, it is more like entertainment’). Mostly the second-generation or firstgeneration people that arrived in the host country at an early age spoke about a connection with their language. One of my informants mentioned the cultural background of it (‘Language: listeners of the same music have mostly the same discourse in their lives and have similar values’).

Contradictions in Evaluating Turbofolk Music Turbofolk is popular, but what do actually people think about it? Most of my respondents (including those who listened to it) claimed that it has the following characteristics: provincialism, small-mindedness or narrow-mindedness, primitivism, amorality, inciting of criminalbehaviour, kitsch and low quality. Some of them even added that it is a social enemy within. Most of them are bothered by some of its elements – usually the accordion sound and the warbling (‘harmonika i zavijanje’), as they can sometimes be interpreted as signs of its ‘oriental’ nature. Often they criticise it for lack of originality. The reality of TF consumption is surprising in contrast to this generally negative attitude towards it. Wherever there are ethnic (‘ex-Yu’) dance clubs, the music they play has a turbofolk nature. Turbofolk parties are occasionally organised even in the non-ethnic clubs. The music scene of the Austrian diaspora is musically monotonous and the clubs are the most soughtafter ethnic sites for the youth.

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This contradictory situation means that most members of the diaspora despise turbofolk, but consume it at the same time. From the outside it is criticised, but as soon as Saturday evening comes, it seems that the best thing to do is to go to a turbofolk party. This situation is very common in the larger cities and places where there is an ethnic club. 47.9 per cent of respondents that listen mostly to turbofolk connect it directly with their identity (in the anonymous questionnaires this was stated 31 times, during interviews only four times). Nevertheless, a certain aspect of shame is apparent in most of the answers collected from respondents who listen to turbofolk (especially when they were asked to openly admit that they listen to TF). It also shows that young individuals that declare their TF preferences can be easily shown in a bad light (or with the same negative connotations which are generally perceived in TF). It turned out that there are many ‘pseudo-consumers’ of TF. These individuals do not directly admit they listen to turbofolk, but from the other questions it is clearly visible that they go solely to the TF clubs and cafe´s, know the songs, etc. Nonetheless, turbofolk is an integrating musical-imaginary space. Its consumers are from different social and intellectual strata, but unite under the banner of TF. The egalitarianism evident in the turbofolk scene is indeed quite typical for most of the dance music scenes. Because of the equalising tendencies of the turbofolk scene, nation-based tensions might be blunted. According to Farrer, an emphasis on the experience of ‘glamorous sophistication’ and the ‘high life’ blurs differences between people. At the same time, senses of belonging to ‘global citizenship’ might be strengthened. Again, the sense of global belonging that TF inspires is reflected in other music scenes throughout the world. Farrer adds that global young people’s dance culture celebrates ‘consumption, fashion and sexuality in which youth on every continent participate, reinforcing as emergent global hegemony of consumer values’ (2005: 481). This fully corresponds to the reality of turbofolk. Some TF consumers in Austria come from ethnic minorities even in their countries of origin (Roma people even have their own turbofolk club in Vienna). Though many of them do not feel the need to claim their national identity, the TF scene is not open to the majority of Austrian society. Also, the collectiveness at some point supports regional belonging. TF parties are often visited by a significant number of Turkish and Albanian people. Rice finds similar trends, including

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positive nationalism based on cultural diversity and cultural (multiethnic) connection, in the consumption of chalga music in Bulgaria.7

Impact of Turbofolk Music on its Consumers Radio, TV or internet determines the mainstream popular music that the public consumes. A repeating compendium of popular music hits creates an imaginary web, which, with time, connects young consumers and unites them via shared experience. According to Jason Toynbee, the mainstream is ‘a formation that brings together large numbers of people from diverse social groups and across large geographical areas in common affiliation to a musical style’ (2002:250). I mentioned this during interviews with my respondents. They very often noted that they know turbofolk and narodna songs (some of them even precisely wordfor-word) without active searching for them or learning them. They have heard them everywhere since they were children and subconsciously remembered them (there are no differences between respondents who grew up in Austria and the ones who grew up in the former ex-Yugoslavia countries). Contemporary popular music also brings with it its idols and lifestyle models. In turbofolk production we can find a multitude of references to materialism and hedonism (expensive goods, sex, alcohol, drugs and so on). If we compare it with Western (mostly US) RnB, pop and disco music production, we can find many similarities. British sociologist Nick Stevenson claims that contemporary global consumerism is accompanied by an increasing rate of personal debt, the spread of loancredit systems, a decay in savings and the dominance of American-style consumerism (2010:330). The ‘hyperconsumer’ movement can primarily be seen in the countries that do not quite belong to the economic global north, yet in which ordinary citizens can still afford ‘show-off materialism’. Similarly, a high rate of materialism and consumerism elements permeates ‘Balkan’ reality and in the practising of turbofolk – especially in its imagery. In the context of diaspora communities we must not forget that sharing turbofolk also evokes transnationality. Music is, in a cultural sense, also a transnational commodity. It is not limited, it can easily cross borders and, according to sociomusicologist Simon Frith, it defines ‘places’. Frith explains that ‘. . . in clubs, scenes and raves, listening on

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headphones, radio and in the concert hall, we are only where the music takes us’ (1996:125). At first glance, it might seem that the consumption of turbofolk in the diaspora leads to the typical expression of a cultural practice within an ethnic perspective (as, for example, Fox and Miller-Idriss observe). That it can be personified by a complementary identification with the country of origin. For example, for a long time I did not understand how it was possible that young Croatians (or Bosnians/Bosniaks) in the diaspora in Austria identify themselves with mostly Ekavian (Serbian-dialect) turbofolk coming from Serbia. The same turbofolk that is related to unfortunate war events during the break-up of Yugoslavia. One of the respondents explained what practising means to her. In principal, she does not identify with the music, but with the consumers of the music. She does the same as the young Croatians in Croatia. She said: ‘I feel connected to my crowd and friends as well as to my country, where this music is mainly listened to’. For another interviewee, TF meant ‘a memory of home’. Although the ex-Yugoslav diaspora might not realise it, they can keep the same patterns of behaviour in Austria as counterparts in the countries of origin. Thus, they can conserve a certain kind of national identity through entertainment (in our case by means of turbofolk), which applies especially for the first generation of migrants.

Autochthonous Turbofolk as an Illustration of Diasporic Identity The notion of autochthonous diasporic turbofolk music is very rare since the majority of turbofolk production is imported from the home countries. Despite this, I found one autochthonous song that can help gain a better understanding of the perception of turbofolk by its consumers. The song ‘Nasˇa sudbina’ certainly uses the general patterns of turbofolk music from the countries of origin and at the same time illuminates an everyday life identity struggle of a migrant/descendant in a particular, musical way.8 Before a brief analysis of the song, it should be noted that the producers of the song, DJ Zoki and Sale, live in Germany. It appears that DJ Zoki is a second-generation migrant. The singer Sale was supposedly born in Serbia, but has lived in Germany for a long time now. The music production is very uniform, both using a relatively large proportion of

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acoustic segments and neutral English language (for example, in the songs Balkan hot step, Balkan is on fire, Balkan nation). Despite the different backgrounds of the producers (which is most apparent in the rap section), their understanding of reality in the diaspora is very similar. The song generally references young people in the diaspora who live ‘on two chairs’. They struggle with their identity. Germany is defined as ‘up’/‘north’ (‘gore’), the Balkan region as ‘down’/‘south’ (‘dole’), which is very common in diasporic vernacular. We can clearly see there is a particular Serbian national language used in the song, although it still appeals to ‘Balkan people’ in general. Further specifications of locations are delineated by the words ‘up there’, ‘down’, ‘here’ (‘gore’, ‘dole’, ‘tu’). The paradigm of the diaspora is highlighted by enumerating countries where ‘Balkan people’ live in the chorus. It is concluded that, even though they live ‘all around the Earth’ and it is thus ‘their destiny’, their roots are in the Balkans and so is their heart. The personified Balkan area can, in a way, be understood as a caretaker/protector. We can find the notion of hybridity in the rap section, which is a typical attribute in the identity of young migrants and their descendants (‘whether to live down or up, if in both of the areas they feel good’). According to the singer, it is possible to live a full and satisfied early life ‘up’, if there is enough entertainment (‘zˇurke’), because one can feel alive. This kind of life contains the following elements: alcohol, music and dance. According to the lyrics, these elements correspond to genuine ‘Balkanness’. The last sentence ‘ajde nazdravite za nasˇu sudbinu’ can mean a celebration of a diasporic destiny. Destiny is a traditional motif, which we can trace back to traditional and NkNM music. Its presence in the song stresses the ethnic background. Generally, the imagery of the song’s music video fits well to the diaspora’s sense of expression. Luxurious goods, fame and image (expensive clothes and shoes brands, fashionable accessories) play an important role there. These material attributes are the main source of one’s personal status in the diaspora. This drive for ostentatious displays of wealth points to the general vulnerability and absence of established social structures available in the home country. The use of symbols and references taken from Western hip-hop, rap and RnB music is probably meant to show similarities between both (turbofolk and Western popular music) scenes. We can find several Western music patterns in the turbofolk industry. We can understand this as a way to create a sense of

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belonging to the young global generation. According to the reactions of listeners, it is possible to deduce that ‘Balkan people’ have a need to relate to the Western music scene. What’s more, they can even enhance it with added value, notably through ethnic elements. An interesting part of this analysis is to examine comments people posted under the video for this song on YouTube. From these, we can deduce certain points. For example, the comments are full of grammatical mistakes and typing errors, which indicates that consumers were probably born in the host country (in the diaspora) or moved there at a young age. According to the dialects in the comments, we can conclude that consumers are from different parts of the former Yugoslavia. Comments suggest that consumers also like to listen to this song while driving. They often comment that they recognise places in the video. Whether or not the assessment is accurate, the recognition still represents a certain connection with their homeland through the Table 6.1

Lyrics from the song ‘Nasˇa sudbina’

Ref: Ovo je nasˇa sudbina, Nemacˇka, Austrija, ima nas sˇirom sveta Italija, Sˇvajcarska, gde god se nalazimo srce nam je uvek tu, i kuca na Balkanu za nasˇu sudbinu. Stalno se pitam gde c´u na kraju da zˇivim, ja sam izabrao put, nec´u nikoga da krivim. Znam da mi je ovde dobro kao i dole, zˇurke, zˇivot i sudbina prate nas do gore. Bum bum bum bum ritam je, za nasˇ narod ajde sipajte, u cˇasˇi vodka viski je, ruke gore ajde igrajte. Srce nam je dole iako mi smo tu, ajde nazdravite za nasˇu sudbinu. 2x ref Nemacˇka, Austrija, Italija, Sˇvajcarska. Kuca na Balkanu za nasˇu sudbinu. 2x ref

Chorus: This is our destiny, Germany, Austria, we are all around the world, Italy, Switzerland, wherever we are, our heart is always here and beats in the Balkans for our destiny. I ask all the time where will I live at the end, I chose the way myself, I will not blame anyone. I know I am ok here, I am ok down too, parties, life and destiny follow us up there. Bang bang bang that is the rhythm, pour it for our nation, there is vodka in the glass, put your hands up and dance. Our heart is down even though we are here, let’s cheer for our destiny. 2x chorus Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland. Beats in the Balkans for our destiny. 2x chorus

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song. Therefore, a close relation between song, homeland and consumer is established. The ethnic (and ethnocentric) component is visible in the following comment: ‘fuck Lady Gaga! Just go on, champions, show the world who the Balkan people are’ (‘POSEREM IM SE NA LADY GAGU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SAMO NAPRED CAREVI POKAZIMO SVETU KO SU BALKANCI:D [sic]’, by user Sikorsky2648).

‘Turbofashion’, ‘Turbostyle’ There are two obvious patterns visible in the everyday reality of listeners of turbofolk. Firstly, peer pressure from friends and the ‘crowd’, with whom the young person spends his/her time with and which plays a major role in the public consumption of turbofolk (in the manner: ‘everybody who I hang out with listens to it [TF], so I listen to it too’). Secondly, the younger the person, the more likely this peer pressure will influence them to start consuming TF. Among Austrian TF parties and cafe´s, age ID is often not required (nor checked) and many guests visit these places at a very young age. It was not an exception for me to meet young people around 15 years old in these places during my research. Using Top Music TV or Okto TV video materials and ethnic magazines it was possible for me to find and explore places of public consumption of turbofolk in Austria. As already mentioned, these places are usually discos and cafe´s. They usually do not have an obvious ethnic name and therefore people who go there have to be well-informed to recognise them. Diaspora members know these places very well and are informed about the current programme, hosting singers, deals, etc. In Austria there are many more cafe´s than discos. A dress code is needed for some of the TF parties. In most of the parties, the dress code does not necessarily differ from the one in the international dance clubs, but sometimes a presumed difference is highlighted. In this case guidelines suggest that women wear high heels (fetishism towards high heels even led to a regular ‘sˇtikla night’ event in one music club in Vienna), sexualised clothes and other recommendations. Explicitly, there are very few rules about how to dress, but turbofolk fans do have certain conventions and therefore they know what kind of dress they are expected to wear. According to some interviewees conventions are also important in order to enjoy the party. One of them stated: ‘Ridiculous texts and choreography, criminal aesthetics, rgcdgc

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rhythm and so on, only if you are not too nostalgic for the 1990s and if you do not know texts of Dr Iggy and the others, I would not recommend you going to such a party, but if you know what to expect, you can have good fun’. Besides this, ‘turbofashion’ closely relates to ‘turbostyle’, which is more complex and, when it comes to the male consumers, it usually overlaps. The clothes women wear for TF parties are not worn on other occasions whereas men wear the same style clothing every day. As already mentioned, high heels are a must for a turbofolk party. Another respondent comments this topic: What is very popular for us are those high heels. If you do not have high heels when you go to Balkan Palace (a club in Graz), you are out, you are simply trash for everyone, it is like this, I don’t understand it, that’s why I don’t like to go to Vanilla in our city, because if you don’t have high heels there, you failed. For example I cannot and don’t want to wear heels every weekend . . . that’s why I go also to Austrian clubs and out with Austrians, instead of our crowd where you have to be 100 per cent perfect and be getting ready for five hours . . . last weekend I went to Balkan Palace . . . there were seven girls at my table and I came as the last one, every single one had a short skirt or a short dress and stilettos, I had only those wedges . . . skirt, black tights and a long-sleeve shirt, I wasn’t so eye-catching and I was left as the last one who wasn’t spoken to by any body. I thought to myself . . . not a chance, the more you show . . . yesss!!! From this comment is apparent that short skirts and tiny dresses are very important. The situation in a typical turbofolk party is as follows. Sexual goal-orientation is very common and is usually initiated by male visitors. Women tend to be placed in the role of a trophy (but not a victim). Interviewees usually admitted that ‘ . . . girls are almost naked, made up as hell . . . and they easily go with someone’. Turbofolk stars were blamed: ‘they simply destroyed the quality, they destroyed the culture in the music, they produce unbelievably too much negative, through that energy that . . . girls from 13, 14 years make love on the streets and become pregnant’. A strong self-eroticism is visible, too. Visitors do care very much about their looks so that they feel attractive. Detailed preparations of one’s image make for club visitors assuming

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self-confident roles (analogously in Bruce J. Biddle’s role theory and Goffman’s performance theory). They are the ones who the others take photos of so that they can feel as perfect as their turbofolk idols. This is evident mainly among the female consumers and the queer community. Visitors usually enjoy the atmosphere by singing and dancing (commonly alone). A state similar to trance is experienced, especially during live performances. One informant described it: ‘it is impossible to describe it to someone who didn’t experience it’ and, ‘only our people [individuals with Balkan roots] can experience it’. Other informants defined the state as ‘death’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘state of soul’, ‘pain’. If there is a big event – for example a well-known singing star, sometimes people fall into a mass madness.9 Clubs usually constitute a more or less anonymous and free zone in which it is possible to express sexually without commitments. In addition, individuals can take a ‘temporary or contextualized identity’ (Farrer 2005:482). A highly interesting finding was detecting a queer ethnic community connected to the dance (TF) scene. In view of the fact that queer communities are still taboo in Balkan countries, it shows another level to the liberal lens of turbofolk consumption and practising in the diaspora. Practicing different sexualities can be seen as a sign of tolerance and possibly collectiveness as particular queer individuals are perceived as ‘our’ (‘nasˇi’) diaspora members. The style is usually subject to the current world fashion. Female visitors also frequently imitate their turbofolk idols. As another interviewee confirmed: ‘I copy the trends (of the singers), what’s in’. The image of the males in TF is rather unified and strongly differs from their Austrian counterparts who visit non-TF discos (another respondent stated: ‘all boys have the same scheme!’). The ‘scheme’ usually means tight jeans, white sneakers, tight shirt or t-shirt with a large V-neck. They show-off their tattoos, expensive watches and gold or silver accessories. A few informants during the interview also drew attention to males’ haircuts, which some of them called ‘deppenfrisur’ (a mocking term for a currently popular haircut). To summarise, ‘turbofashion’ is rather supportive of a young look and therefore mostly young people visit places where they can consume turbofolk. A detailed observation of TF parties can lead us to a specification of some ethnic symbols as well. Visitors sometimes wear necklaces with religious motifs (Orthodox/Catholic crosses, beat, etc.) and tattoos

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with national or religious themes. Interestingly these small ethnic markers do not interfere with interethnic cohesion. In some of the parties, people dance kolo (especially during KUD shows, which are presented as national events even having turbofolk singers as hosts or during turbofolk parties focused on an older age profile – 30-plus).10 However, in the majority of ordinary turbofolk parties, visitors just passionately sing and keep their hands up. If a female singer is hosting, there are mostly women in front of the stage, if there is a male singer, mostly men occupy the front. This could be interpreted as gender identification or idolisation. In the majority of the clubs and cafe´s, visitors and staff speak Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian. Traditional gender roles are applicable – for example, women do not pay for their drinks and a woman never goes to the club alone. Most of the visitors are men.

Conclusion Turbofolk can be perceived as a subculture or a post-subcultural phenomenon in the Balkan diaspora. Nevertheless, if we disregard the diaspora factor, TF becomes just a part of mainstream culture emanating from the Balkan countries. Autochthonous turbofolk, produced among the diaspora, is rare. However, whether it is autochthonous or not, TF is unbelievably popular. Young generations of the former Yugoslav diaspora in Austria culturally identify through music and social contacts. In relation to the theory of Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008), nationhood through TF can be expressed consciously while going to ethnic parties, speaking languages of the countries of origin or singing in them and building relations/ groups with people who share this interest. It can be also practised subconsciously in the private sphere. Although the basis for identification process through music of an ethnic minority member can be definitely connected with national or ethnic belonging, the national aspect should not be perceived as the only layer. Turbofolk represents an identification process that might be considered primarily nationally oriented but individual identification goes far beyond this and depends on the subjective perception of each person. Practising turbofolk can take up many forms, from simple enjoyment of erotic body movements to queer identity contribution or in the relation towards an imaginary homeland. It is important to stress the strong Balkan

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(collective or pan-ethnic) notion connected to the TF scene. Collective understandings of TF can be perceived as shared national spaces. The national background of a particular TF consumer does not play any role in evaluating TF – Bosnians, Bosniaks, Croatians, Serbians and Macedonians gain the same positive or negative (although surprisingly apolitical and nationally uncrystallised) relation to turbofolk. Respondents did not mention any political or nationalistic allusions. Not one respondent related it to the criminal records of singers in the 1990s or nationalistic propaganda of Slobodan Milosˇevic´. This finding is interesting, as the global ex-Yugoslav diaspora is generally assessed as very nationalistic (for example, a study of Gordana Blagojevic´ notes the presence of nationalistic and insulting comments under one of the turbofolk songs on YouTube. However it is not possible to analyse where those users are from and whether they are consumers or not) (Blagojevic´ 2012:166). Austrian reality might not be different, but the turbofolk scene there seems to have laid aside those tensions. On the contrary, TF seems to figure as a means to connect people from the same region. TF listeners simply want to have fun. The results also showed that when it comes to the consumption of turbofolk, it does not matter how long diaspora members have lived in Austria or whether they belong to the first or to the second generation. The key factors lie in whom they frequently meet, where they live and how old they are.

Notes 1. The Balkan area, as related to turbofolk, can include countries from the whole Balkan peninsula as turbofolk (or pop-folk and other hybrid forms of popular music) is common in all of them. 2. The terms ‘consumer’ or ‘consumers’ are widely used in this chapter. They primarily relate to listeners of turbofolk (secondarily also to the listeners of ‘novokomponovana’ or ‘narodna’ music). This terminology is chosen due to the scope of post-modern consumerism, where I conceptually place turbofolk. 3. In Serbian referred to as novokomponovana narodna muzika, in Croatian as novokomponirana narodna glazba. For better understanding it should be added that NkNM is usually also called narodna (national music) or narodnjaci. To make matters more confusing, the term narodna and narodnjaci can be used also for turbofolk music by its consumers. Turbofolk (and sometimes NkNM) can be denominated as cajke (a Croatian term) or dzˇigara or dzˇigera (especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina).

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4. Turbofolk and similar styles have existed in some countries of former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosova [where it is known as tallava]) for a while. Besides Western styles of popular music, it has been the most visible mass-consumed music style. In Slovenia as well as in Croatia it has obtained a special position – for further details, see the works of Baker, Gotthardi-Pavlovski and Mursˇicˇ. In Romania the TF counterpart is known as musica˘ orientala˘, in Albania as tallava and in Bulgaria as chalga. 5. See Vı´t Zdra´lek. 2015. Mapping the Individual Musical Experience in postApartheid South Africa: A Bio-Ethnography of Township Dweler Lesiba Samuel Kadiaka. Praha: Univerzita Karlova. 6. Sevdah is a traditional music style connected to the Bosnian Muslim cultural tradition. 7. See Timothy Rice. 2002. ‘Bulgaria or Chalgaria: The Attenuation of Bulgarian Nationalism in a Mass-Mediated Popular Music’. Yearbook for Traditional Music 34:25 – 46. 8. The song can be viewed on the YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v¼J9bTLzkxy0U (Accessed 13 April 2015). 9. As an illustration, see the Facebook pages of one of the largest clubs in Vienna, Insomnia: https://www.facebook.com/insomniaclubvienna?fref¼ts (Accessed 9 May 2015). 10. KUD – ‘kulturno-umjetnicˇko drusˇtvo’ is a minority club with a cultural and artistic purpose. It mostly consists of several groups for traditional dances. Kolo is a traditional circle dance, common in most of the Balkan countries.

CHAPTER 7 SOMETHING BULGARIAN FOR DINNER:BULGARIAN POPULAR CUISINE AS A SELLING POINT Rayna Gavrilova

Introduction Scholars have recently widened their interest in the symbolism of food production and food consumption. Building on the work of scholars such as Douglas (1966) and Levi-Strauss (1974), scholarship has examined the role and meaning of food both to the individual and society in a variety of contexts. Looking at food production through constructivist lenses and seeing it as cultural and social choices originating at the individual level (Appadurai 1988; Cwiertka 2006; Murdoch et al. 2000) has allowed research to go beyond an economistic or exotically cultural dimension to pay more attention to the symbolics of food consumption (Cusack 2000; Wilk 1999). This chapter is a further attempt in this direction. Douglas and Isherwood (1996) and Miller (1987) have emphasised the significance of choosing and (non)consuming certain products for identity production and performance. By looking at practices of food consumption in the everyday life of Bulgarians, this study seeks to define the relationship between performed and declared identities. Framed in a debate initiated by Billig (1995) on banal nationalism and continued in literature on everyday production of identities

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(Edensor 2002, 2006; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008; Fox 2016; Polese et al. 2017), this chapter is constructed on the assumption that an individual’s and groups’ political choices are not always dictated by the state and may be performed through channels that are spontaneous, unofficial, informal, invisible or intangible (Antonsich 2015; Edensor 2002; Fox 2016; Pawłusz and Polese 2017; Polese 2009, 2010, 2014; Skey 2015). This, with particular reference to former socialist spaces, adds to attempts to reconceptualise the study of national identity in the region and look at a variety of tools and instruments to do so. This encompasses politically constructed identities whose meaning is reshaped by the context (Adams 2010; Isaacs and Polese 2015, 2016; Polese and Horak 2015) to competition between segments of a society (Cheskin 2013; Isaacs and Polese 2015, 2016) with particular attention to the role of the everyday (Knott 2015; Morris 2016; Pawłusz and Seliverstova 2016; Seliverstova 2016, 2017). Accordingly, this chapter attempts to provide a further account confirming the importance of everyday practices to the processes of (national and local) identity-formation. This chapter explores the influence of micro on macro processes of national identity-building, through the production of cultural identity in the hospitality industry. It is based on a study of the online self-presentation of restaurants offering national cuisine. It explores the declared new standard and new consensus among caterers on what is ‘national’ cuisine and national culinary heritage. Ultimately, it is proposed that ‘the past’, ‘the authentic’ and ‘the Bulgarian’ quality is modelled on the pre-World War II Bulgarian peasant home. However, the chapter unveils an ongoing and dynamic process of constructing and naming the structures of the national cuisine. This process is, essentially, a bricolage, which leaves ample space for individual contributions. In contrast to popular nationalistic rhetoric, the national cuisine incorporates freely Turkish names and products, identifying and accepting them as ‘Bulgarian’. The flexibility of the vocabulary of national style, open to include new terms, test new products and, in general experiment, mirrors a tendency to construct a food identity that is inclusive and ever-expanding. This is in contrast to or notwithstanding the official narratives on Bulgarian identity, which evolve in a less dynamic way and tend to be typically less inclusive and flexible.

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Why Food as a National Practice? In Bulgaria, research on food and eating as a social and cultural practice is a scientific ‘field in the making’ (to borrow from the title of Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s 1998 article on French gastronomy). The statement implies by no means the absence of sufficient empirical material or general-interest texts. The ethnography of pre-modern alimentation and of folk customs involving food, is represented by a number of publications.1 The properly anthropological or – more broadly – cultural questions, surrounding the acquisition, preparation and consumption of food however became a matter of interest only recently and systematic observations, particularly longitudinal ones, are still scarce. The fact that this new field does not have a name in Bulgarian is indicative: the phrase ‘culture of eating’ is usually associated with manners; ‘food culture’ points to the biological lab; ‘nutritional anthropology’ sounds awkward and is almost never used. The descriptive name ‘research (or anthropology) on food and eating’ is a poor substitute for the short and established field ‘food studies’ but is the closest approximation to a definition of the field. Food and eating are powerful cultural forms, which put on display essential individual and collective meanings (Douglas 2014; Wilk 1999). This idea, introduced by the founding fathers of sociology and anthropology and developed brilliantly by the structuralist tradition (Barthes 1961; Douglas 1966; Levi-Strauss 1974), offers a possible approach to understanding social reality but also bring into the analysis systems and border fields of a different order. In a global context of destabilised communities, models, boundaries and shared meanings, food and eating represent an anthropological field, where one can observe concisely the formation, deformation and reformation of cultural practices and identities. The proposed text is an attempt to survey the commercialisation of culture and more specifically food practices, as part of the big question of postcommunist identities in Bulgaria. It builds on a venerable tradition of food metaphors, such as the historic Paris a` table (Briffault 1846); bows to Levi-Strauss’ famous phrase that food could be bon a` penser (Levi-Strauss 1971:89); recognises the heuristic potential of Alsayyad’s ‘consuming tradition’ (Alsayyad 2001) and Bell and Valentine’s ‘consuming geographies’ (Bell and Valentine 1997). The play of meanings implied by these metaphors renders them irresistible and even

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more so by the fact that the relationship between culture and consumption is an established idea.2

What is Food as a National Consumption Practice? The lack of systematic observations on individual and collective consumption that could provide a sound empirical base made it necessary to use a specific archive: the self-presentation of restaurants on the internet. The intentions behind these representations are obvious: attract attention, patrons, consumption and revenues through provision of services and merchandise appealing to paying customers. Within this broad research field I focus on a particular type of establishment which has direct bearing on the questions about culture, national identity and cultural heritage: restaurants that advertise Bulgarian national cuisine and ambiance. The fact that these are commercial establishments which monetise cultural preferences is particularly interesting because it allows us to glimpse certain hierarchies and, correspondingly, make an assessment of the gravitational pull of the proposed and consumed culture. In the absence of (publicly available) market research on the hospitality sphere in Bulgaria, the owners become marketing specialists, whom Richard Johnson calls ‘the cultural accountants of capitalism’ (quoted in Tomlinson 2005:16). The tradition of restaurants offering national cuisine dates almost from the time of the very emergence of commercial caterers in Bulgaria (see Velichkov 2004:160– 2; Kiradzhiev, 2001:352– 7). The efforts to develop public eating into a profitable economic sector gained momentum during the communist period and resulted in the proliferation of a special sub-category ‘home-style establishment’ (bitovo zavedenie)3 in the seaside resorts first and then in the bigger cities, managed by a special enterprise ‘Balkantourist’. Unlike regular restaurants, the purpose of which was ‘to provide affordable and nutritious food and satisfy the food needs of the broad working masses’, these establishments were created to ‘satisfy the needs of the foreign guests in our country’ (Kratki lekcii 1957:7). I came across the term ‘home-style establishment’ for the first time in a text from 1969, which laid out the standardising norms and practices of the regulated economy. These new public places adopted a number of specific features, which permanently entered the food nomenclature, settings and props:

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‘The cutlery used in the home-style establishments should be selected according to their category; the tables must be covered with decorative bitovi tablecloths and bitov crockery’ (Lekcii 1969:3). Both items were freely modelled on traditional forms, colour, patterns and materials, derived from the traditional pre-modern peasant ware. The empirical base for my research is the systematised information on the restaurants in Sofia, presented on the internet site Zavedeniata (‘The Establishments’)4 and tagged as offering ‘Bulgarian cuisine’. The category displays information on 934 establishments, defined as restaurants,5 which means they offer the full range of services: comprehensive menus; eating on the spot; service by a waiter; formal list to choose from. Of them, 137 were defined as ‘taverns’;6 110 as ‘beerhouses’; 153 as ‘pubs’; and 31 as ‘folk clubs’. That means less than half of the establishments use the designation ‘tavern’ (mehana) – the traditional name for a national cuisine restaurant. The examination of the visual representations shows that only the taverns exhibit the recognisable interior of the ‘home-style establishment’. In addition to being listed in the ‘Bulgarian’ category, 876 of the restaurants claim that they offer ‘Bulgarian cuisine’ exclusively or together with other cuisines (Italian being the most popular). The observation that 93.8 per cent of the restaurants advertise that they offer ‘Bulgarian cuisine’ deserves brief comment. The fact that ethnic identity influences food preferences is well known and extensively discussed (see for instance Smith 1967; Finkelstein 1989; Girardelli 2004; Vukov, Ivanov 2010; KrastevaBlagoeva 2010). It does not matter whether the ‘ethnic’ is one’s own or ‘alien’: its attractiveness and influence on consumer choices is ubiquitous. These interpretations could be developed in several directions: the purely sensory experience; the confirmation and the pleasure of rediscovering one’s own identity; public demonstration of loyalty or/and statuses; proxy for experiencing the exotic. The national/ ethnic sells food. Here my interest is not so much in the attractiveness of the national (which hardly could be studied on the base of promotional texts only) but rather in the ‘brand’, the product sold and more specifically in the question of whether there is a new established norm, new consensus among restaurant owners as to what is national cuisine and culinary heritage; how does it relate to past models; how is it communicated to the consuming audiences? In this perspective one would seek to find out whether the dishes (the ‘units’) of the national

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cuisine and the menus (the ‘syntactic’ systems) have changed (I am referring, of course, to the well-known article by Roland Barthes on the psychosociology of taste (Barthes 1961). I have no doubts that the substantive work of (re-)construing the narrative of the national cuisine could be done only after a thorough examination of additional representational texts (including fora, chats, blogs and comments) and particularly after a systematic study of actual consumption practices. The next level of analysis and interpretation – the study of the diets (the ‘styles’ in the semiotic metaphor) – cannot be done without field research. I was not able to engage in this task and decided to limit my analysis to the space situated between the real product and the consumer where the collective imaginary unfolds and where ‘significant production of false perceptions and values’ (Barthes 1979) takes place.

How to Read the Food as Text The site Zavedeniata was chosen precisely because it offers a good opportunity to compare cases. The information is standardised: each entry includes profile photo, visitor counter and uniform sections. From the list of restaurants that offer solely Bulgarian cuisine (18 out of 900) and 37 others, which offer Bulgarian cuisine plus grilled dishes and ‘Balkan grill’, plus 55 establishments where the interior was entirely or predominantly traditional (bitov), I selected a group of 18 establishments. All restaurants in the group have full information (including menus); they are rather popular; the food and the ambiance are typically ‘Bulgarian’. Their menus and photos formed the sample to study the representation of national food identity. Every restaurant from the group included on its page a short text for self-presentation. All but two contain explicit claims for origin or affiliation, sometimes two or more: ‘Bulgarian’, ‘national’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘authentic’, ‘bitov’, ‘traditional’. Some descriptions (in which I include the restaurant name in Bulgarian and then English) are mostly general invitations and statements, such as: ‘Bitovo establishment with its own style’ (Mamin Kolio, Mama’s Kolio); ‘authentic Bulgarian environment from once upon a time’ (Izbata, The Cellar); ‘the atmosphere is in traditional bitov style, the quality of the food – guaranteed. Come taste the magic of the

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Bulgarian cuisine’ (Magiata na chergite, The magic of the carpets); ‘cosy bitov environment’ (Nashe Selo, Our Village); ‘Welcome and come in to eat a bite of home cooked dishes and to immerse yourself in the coziness of the times bygone. The setting in Petleto will impress you with its authentic bitov style’ (Petleto, The Little Rooster); ‘a contemporary establishment in traditional-national style, adapted to the requirements of the modern times’ (Pri Shopite, At the Shopi);7 ‘authentic Bulgarian cuisine’ (Delvite, The Jars). Others make clear attempts at poetry: ‘Right here, close to the Vitosha lakes, where Bulgarianness is still to be found, our tavern was created to bring together people around rich wines and music [. . .] With recipes collected over the ages, once you taste them, you come back’ (Djorevata kashta, Djore’s House); or ‘built in the spirit of the Bulgarian home, exuding coziness with its authentic interior [. . .] dishes accompanied with flowing wines [. . .] collection of authentic Rhodope8 bells and elements of the culture of the Rhodope corner of Bulgaria’ (Rhodopski chanove, Rhodope Bells); or ‘The Bulgarian restaurant Chevermeto, whatever your heart desires! The restaurant Chevermeto brings together authentic setting, old recipe dishes and a folk performance’ (Chevermeto, The Spit); or ‘a combination of authentic Bulgarian national revival atmosphere, infused with classic folk motives, recipes of older [sic!] Bulgarian recipes and music, which merges the sound of the pipe and the shepherd’s flute with the sprightly and solemn voice of the bells. The tavern offers to its guests the opportunity to immerse themselves in the depths of Revival Bulgaria,9 to feel the spirit of the voyvodi,10 to savour the traditional Bulgarian hospitality, to see and listen to the sound of the popular bells and their clear voices’ (Mehana Chanovete, Tavern of The Bells). Some even present small dramatic scenes: The common table in the restaurant Rodopska kashta brings together family, friends and even just acquaintances, therewith strengthening the patriarchal tradition of the Rhodopians – the

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tradition to be always together. The host-Rhodopian is always welcoming. He treats every guest – a traveller, a beggar or a relative – with an open heart. We meet our guests with ‘Welcome’ and direct them to the table: ‘Please partake of what you find’. For the newcomers we have prepared a small sample of the traditional Rhodope dishes. The incomparable taste of the Rhodope dishes and the wonderful Bulgarian wines [. . .] The magic of the Rhodope song [. . .] The colours of the folk costumes [. . .] The magical sound of the Rhodope pipe and the silver ringing of the bells (Rodopska kashta, The Rhodope House). In front of you our chef will cook special dishes on a woodfuelled grill and following old Bulgarian recipes. The meat is always fresh, coming from livestock raised high in the mountains exclusively for the restaurant Murafeti. The establishment has a folklore program – including authentic Bulgarian instruments and human voices that bring you in touch with the cosmic feel of the folklore (Murafeti). And finally the emblematic presentations (abridged): Restaurant Under the Lindens is located in an old Bulgarian house, which is a historical monument, a classical Bulgarian house built of stone and wood. The restaurant enchanted visitors since its very opening in 1926 as a pub named Select. Elin Pelin, the creator of some of the best Bulgarian short stories in that tumultuous period gave it the name Under the Lindens, which survived until today. Elin Pelin was among the patrons of the small neighbourhood pub, which sheltered a number of famous Bulgarians and offered them tranquillity and cosiness to write their stories and articles, while sharing the wine from Karabunar and Vinogradets [. . .] The meats and hash prepared on the spot, the yogurt and the cheeses, the bread and the preserves bring our guests back to the world of their childhood memories and grandma’s dishes [. . .] The pitas and the piperades being and a constant element of the Bulgarian table, we prepare for our guests a number of pita breads and pastries baked in ovens, as well as delicious piperades and baba ganoush with freshly roasted vegetables (Pod Lipite, Under the Lindens).

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(All quotations are from 5 January 2015). The main elements of the ‘national taste’ expected to attract the customers/consumers are easy to pinpoint even in this small sample: ‘once upon a time/past/old/national revival period’, bitov, ‘authentic’, ‘domestic’, ‘gozba’,11 ‘wine’, ‘music/folklore/pipes/bells/songs’, ‘grill/ meat’. In all cases but two, the visual representations in the available logos, posted on the front page of each restaurant complements or supplements the story: a sample of ten images exhibits repetitive motifs: use of retro fonts; the name written in a circle or arc (association with a vault, wheel, stamp); graphic representations of traditional houses; imitation of old illustrations, etc. The colour palette is also surprisingly uniform: sepia and brown prevail, with accents in red, yellow and white. The leading marketing strategy of selling ‘Bulgarianness’ however is clearest in the photo spreads, available on the website. All establishments present from a few to more than 50 photos of their interior, garden (if existing), dishes, events organised in the restaurant: clear evidence of the importance of the visual aspects in the presentation of the national restaurant. If we are to describe it summarily, the ambiance is bitova – traditional, domestic, peasant, nineteenth-century. Seventeen out of our 18 cases are arranged in this style. Like the written descriptions, it is not difficult to identify the almost canonical elements: stone walls; wooden pillars and lintels; wooden rustic tables and benches; rugs; white lace curtains on the windows; several decorations such as cart wheels (on the wall or as lamps), traditional pottery, lanterns, farming instruments, costumes, baskets and kegs, plaited onion or dried red peppers. Almost half the restaurants have a fireplace or an oven in the main space. Almost all have a designated place for a music band or a dance floor. The planning and the execution vary from kitsch (Kaiser, Mamin Kolio) to almost museum-quality authenticity (Pod Lipite, Rodopski Chanove) and from stuffed tawdriness to tasteful minimalism. The elements of the interior leave no doubt that the past, authenticity and Bulgarianness are imagined as sanitised versions of the pre-World War II rural house. This is not surprising if we recall the fact that in 1944, 78 per cent of the Bulgarian population lived in villages, meaning that this kind of environment is the familiar domestic scene of their childhood or of their grandparents for a significant portion of the adult Bulgarian population. The claims of authenticity ring true. The intriguing aspect is the total lack of awareness of the incongruity and

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dissonance observable: we see TV sets hung on wooden pillars (in one case the pillar is wrapped in sheep skin); arcopal sets arranged on top of machine-woven traditional style tablecloths; modern oil and vinegar sets on rustic tables; kitschy paintings on the walls. In only few of the establishments one sees consistent effort to maintain the authentic atmosphere, to clearly separate the old from the modern or, even more rarely, to reinvent the traditional creatively in the space of the modern restaurant. One may suppose that the lack of interest among the owners mirrors the general absence of interest in real authenticity among the customers. The bricolage of randomly selected signs is sufficiently recognisable and satisfactory.12

The Structure of the Menu: The Sign System The study of the structure of the menus – the kinds and sequencing of offered dishes – is an interesting approach to reveal the changes in social practices and cultural attitudes, as Jean-Louis Frandrin (2002) has demonstrated convincingly. The menu as a concept and as a practice did not exist in the everyday life of Bulgarian families until the accelerated modernisation and urbanisations at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries: people ate just one dish (something cooked or something dry taken to work), rarely preceded by a soup or pickles (Gavrilova, 1999:99). The end of the nineteenth century saw the importation of the idea of a three-course meal: first course (soup), second course (cooked or a-la-minute) and third course (dessert) for those who could afford them, of course. The practice was a radical, sometimes objectionable, novelty: sources from this period offer testimonies that people from the older generations found the idea of eating more than one dish in one meal shocking (Hadzhiiski 1974:220 n.2). As far as we can determine in the absence of representative and longitudinal data, the practice spread primarily among the urban middle classes, from the lowest segments (qualified workers, petty clerks, artisans) to the highest (senior state servants, entrepreneurs, senior military officers). The adoption of the new model was undoubtedly facilitated by the proliferation of knowledge about the ‘proper’, ‘good’ (bourgeois) eating and was predicated on the availability of a housewife or domestic help to prepare three-course meals every day.13

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If the introduction of food categories such as soup, dessert and salad was a result of the previously mentioned processes and accounts for the change in the domestic style of eating, it was the festive food which provided the prototype and influenced the development of the meals eaten out. The traditional festive table was distinctive in its contents and volume: it started with aperitif of strong alcoholic beverages, consumed with meze (Turkish from Persian – a selection of small dishes served to accompany alcoholic drinks), followed by rich soups, main dish (often roasted or baked), pastry, dry fruits and nuts. The model of the French festive meal, introduced by the royal palace and foreigners and expatriates, brought the appetizers (starters) and the real desserts. Very soon the growing number of published cookbooks cemented the new norm of a decent meal: a starter, main course and dessert.14 What do we observe in the menus of the restaurants which advertise their allegiance to Bulgarian cuisine? In most cases they organise their offerings according to the type of the dishes and not according to their place in the sequence of courses, as is the case with the classic EuroAtlantic menus. For instance, the dishes that would normally be listed under the heading ‘starters’ we find distributed between two to six separate categories: salads, soups, cold starters, hot starters, mezes, sometimes as invented categories such as ‘delicacies’ or ‘caprices’. The main courses usually appear under this very general heading but often they are grouped according to the meat or the speed of preparation (long-cooking vs a-la-minute). The grill is always separate even if the dishes could be an appetiser or main course. What is interesting is the mass introduction between the starters and the main courses of a special category – the ‘satch’.15 Yet another idiosyncrasy are the purely invented categories observable only in single restaurants only, such as ‘selected old recipes’ (Delvite), ‘From the spit’ (Chevermeto), ‘Rhodopian specialties’ and ‘from Grandma’s kitchen’ (Rodopski Chanove), ‘The offer of the Master’ (Zagorka), ‘For seriously hungry people’ etc. This structure of the menus suggests a couple of interesting points. First, the occurrence of the same nine categories of dishes (even if named differently) in the repertoire of the majority of the establishments (salads, cold starters, warm starters, mezes, grill, main dishes, satch, fish and desserts) indicates that there is an unspoken consensus among the caterers concerning the expectations of the patrons of national cuisine restaurants. If we compare this, let’s call it, ‘core menu’, with the menus

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of the other types of restaurants we see a lot of commonalities, but two categories – the mezes and the satch – are almost exclusively represented in our type of establishments. Second, in the other types of restaurants the headings of the different categories of dishes are as a rule the established designations (soup, salad, starter, etc.), while we see a great variety in the composition and names in the ‘national’ restaurants. As a first hypothesis I propose that we are witnessing a dynamic process of constructing and naming the national cuisine; that this process is, again, a kind of bricolage and leaves a lot of space for the contribution of individuals with their understanding of what constitutes the national specificity (experimentation). In addition, the crafters of the Bulgarian national cuisine borrow unproblematically from Turkish elements. These have entered Bulgarian language and practice (meze, satch) in stark contrast with the popular and populist nationalist rhetoric. A number of these categories of dishes, such as razjadka (roughly ‘starter’, something to start the process of eating), topenitsa (dip, something to dip into), satch, gjuveche (diminutive from Turkish guvec, earthenware pot), keremida (tile), are nowhere to be found in A Collection of Food Recipes, the bible of cooking during the socialist period (1968, 951 pages, 1303 recipes) and the cookbooks published before 1944. The term satch is mentioned twice in the first two Bulgarian cooking and advice books, published in 1870 and only with its original meaning of a ceramic plate. Inversely, two dishes with Slavic names and, possibly, provenance – the parzhenitsa (something fried) and the trienitsa (something ground) – that we find in the earlier cookbooks have disappeared altogether. I would suggest that the reason is that they are specific dishes and cannot be transformed into a category. In general, it seems that the ancient sound of a food not so much the actual dish suffices to endow the new dishes with the consumer value of ‘authenticity’. The menu, the syntactic system, has acquired an essentially European body (salad, starter, main dish, dessert) but has developed several Bulgarian-Balkan offshoots, some of which have no real precedents in the traditional cuisine.

The Words of the National Culinary Discourse Our investigation becomes even more interesting when we start examining the collection of lexemes that make the sentences of the national commercial eating: the dishes in the context of their category.

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Any category is good for reading and analysing but I will focus on the salads only, which offer particularly rich empirical data. The salads do not exist either as a concept or as a practice prior to the re-establishment of a national Bulgarian state in 1878, the growth of the trend-setting elites and receptive urban middle classes and the emergence of the instruments of change of the culinary culture (media, cookbooks, vocational training). The term ‘salad’ was mentioned first in 1870 by Petko Slaveykov in the recipe ‘beet salad’ (Slaveykov 1870:75); the idea of serving chopped vegetables with condiments was totally alien. Twenty years later, the Bulgarian lexicographer Naiden Gerov included the word in his magisterial five-volume Dictionary of the Bulgarian language (1978, 5:110), but, interestingly, provides a double gender form – a masculine and a feminine. Throughout the years the number of salads included in the cookbook increases steadily: from eight in a cookbook from 1904 to 47 in a cookbook from 1933. We see an impressive number and variety of salads on the menus of Bulgarian cuisine establishments, an average of 20.5 different salads per restaurant. In 14 out of the 18 restaurants they are placed at the beginning of the printed menus. Even more impressively, there is an absolute consensus about The National Salad, with capital letters, and this is the Shopska salad (named after the same regional group in western Bulgaria, the Shopi). The salad is present on the menu of every single restaurant in our group, with the same name. Almost half of the establishments list the ingredients of the salad and again the uniformity is noteworthy: the five mandatory elements are tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers (raw or roasted), onion and Bulgarian white cheese (feta). Two restaurants find it necessary to embellish by adding a blurb: ‘The taste of eternal Bulgaria’ (Mehana Chanovete) and ‘The Bulgarian Tradition’ (Magiata na chergite). The mythology surrounding the Shopska salad has been discussed by researchers (Dechev, 2010) and it is important to draw attention to the fact that two of its ingredients (tomatoes and peppers) were adopted by the Bulgarians only after mid-nineteenth century, a circumstance that throws doubt on the claim of its ‘eternal taste’. Any attempt to challenge the myth, however, as did Albena Shkodrova in her book Soc Gourmet (Shkodrova, 2014) provokes heated debates, revealing the high emotional temperature of the national food discourse. Second in popularity is the Shepherd’s Salad (in 14 establishments), where eggs, yellow cheese, salami or ham and

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mushrooms are added to the ingredients of the Shopska. In seven cases we see a ‘Peasant salad’, virtually undistinguishable from the Shopska salad. In third place comes the green salad (from lettuce or different salad greens), present on 13 menus, with or without the additions of boiled eggs, chicken and cheese. It appears under several different names (Women’s Salad, Chef’s salad, Rigoletto, Meze, Salad for connoisseurs, etc.). Separately, we see numerous occurrences of green salad with (canned) tuna fish (in 15 establishments) – a surprising finding, considering that canned tuna was not sold in Bulgaria before the end of the communist regime. Tomato salad is available in nine restaurants, most often served with feta cheese or buffalo cheese; separately, seven restaurants offer tomatoes with mozzarella, in three cases correctly named Caprese. Next in popularity are the salads of peppers, carrots, cabbage and carrots. The salads made of cabbage and of cucumbers are relatively infrequent – a surprising fact, given that both vegetables were among the few autochthonous crops cultivated in the region since prehistoric times. At the same time, salads with potatoes, native plants of the Americas, which came to Bulgaria in the late nineteenth century, are more popular. The common potato salad occurs with this name four times, but we see it once as ‘Our own’ salad and once as ‘Chorbadzhi’ salad (Chorbadzi is the Turkish name for a wealthy and influential man). The absurdity of the naming is obvious: the potatoes were neither ‘our’, nor chorbadzhi’s food as they were introduced at the time when the chorbadzhis were already history. Of particular interest is a group of salads with names that occur just once; do not exist in the pre-modern cuisine; do not appear in the cookbooks published between 1878 and 1944, when intense codification and Europeanisation of the domestic food practices took place; cannot be found in the recipe collections for state canteens and restaurants during the socialist period.16 This means, evidently, that the dishes have been invented in the last 20 years or so. Their names reveal clearly how the culinary culture is constructed and packaged for commercial purposes and I would claim that the observations on this phenomenon are valid for the domain of the national culture in general. The reservoir of ideas how to define the ‘Bulgarian’ quality could be roughly structured in three main sources of inspiration. The majority of the names, a total of 19 cases, are derived from the designations of professions or statuses: salads of the ‘Boyards’ (2), ‘The mayor of our

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village’, ‘the Monks’, ‘the Wagoners’, ‘the Inn-keepers’, ‘the Mummers’, ‘the Monastery’, ‘the Tavern’, ‘the Master’, ‘the Marketplace’, ‘the Priest’, ‘the Fisherman’, ‘the Haydut’, ‘the Choban’ (shepherd in Turkish), ‘the Chorbadzi’ (without counting the previously mentioned ‘Peasant’ and ‘Shepherd’s’ salads). The second big group are the salads with geographic names: from Arbanasi,17 Bulgaria, Vratsa, Lom, Samokov, Ihtiman, Chukurovo, Thrace, the Rhodope, the Balkan (Stara planina), etc. – a total of 18. The third category form the names, related to the kin nomenclature: Grandma’s salad (2); Grandpa’s, Women’s, Men’s, Daddy’s, Maidens’, ‘Our garden’. Seven names hint at the quality of the salad: ‘Connoisseurs’18 (2), ‘More-more-most’, ‘Plum brandy’, ‘Three plum brandies’, ‘Old fashion’, ‘For meze’. The remaining cases mention an interesting ingredient (iceberg lettuce, salmon), distant location (Cyprus, Sicily) or something idiosyncratic (Rigoletto, the Rugs, Pink kiss). The intentions behind the choice of a name seem obvious in two groups. The kin group refers the customer to her/his childhood and youth memories, when everything was homey and ‘one’s own’. The same is valid for the geographic group, as the places are major anchors of identities. The first group however is very interesting and calls for unpacking. We see among the names a few recurring motifs and their connection with the food sold is not unilinear and the range of associations is far richer. Names such as ‘Komita’s’ (Insurgents) and ‘Haydut’s’ (highway men who opposed the Ottomans) carry the aura of heroism, rebellion, opposition, unsettlement, repudiation of the normal life, which sets itself radically apart from the idea of peacefully consuming food according the protocol and tradition. I would add to these names with provocative undertones the occupations of the innkeepers and the tavern-keepers, who were liminal figures in the popular imagination. The salads served under these names offer different combination of common vegetables, with a more elaborate preparation (such as peeling the tomatoes). This is in comic dissonance with what we know about the lifestyle of the komitas and hayduts, not to mention the fact that many of these vegetables did not exist in the region at the time of the Ottoman Empire. We observe the same discrepancy between the name and the substance, between the signifier and signified that we saw in the menu structure. The lexical spices added to an ordinary salad apparently provide the ‘sizzle word’,19 which can have no relation

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whatsoever to the product – a trick known to every marketing expert. However, the ‘Komita’s’ salad offers something that cannot be found in the restaurants serving French cuisine: it is ‘our own’, masculine, rebellious cooking; its ingredients have nothing to do with the implied story, which unfolds in the space of the imaginary, between the name and the product. It is the association created by the name that makes the salad ‘Bulgarian’. The ubiquitous presence of the grilled foods is due to their delectable taste in first place but no less to the strong link between roasted/grilled meats and festivity and its association with ‘manliness’ and ‘heroism’: we are aware of the gendered eating20 (women cook, while men roast) and we know that the real Hayduts, who were living in the mountains and the forests, prepared their food on open fires. The salad inventions, the popularity of the grilled meats and satchs seem to lead to a conclusion that the Bulgarian cuisine as perceived, represented and sold in the restaurants clearly valorises the roasted/grilled/a-la-minute/ manly/meaty/festive food. The imagery is not only manly and heroic but also outdoorsy, different from the tedious kitchen work. Even the salads, which are vegetable-based and vegetables are grown and cooked by women, manage to adhere to this perception. The other status-related salads in our sample point to a different set of questions. Most of them are named after professions or social roles of whom it is known that they eat well: Boyards, Mayors, Chorbadzhis, priests, masters, tavern-keepers. These salads seem to be promising something more than the ordinary, of the more affluent and influential classes. I should mention that I did not find a single salad named after the professions of the modern elites (officers, let’s say, or ministers). At the opposite end we find salads named after the profession of hard and intense labourers: the shepherds, who tend to their flocks all day and in any weather, under different names (pastoralists, chobani);21 the harvesters; the wagoners, the regional transhumance pastoralist Karakachani (sarakatsani). Again, all names belong to the rural way of life – I never found a salad named after a tailor, let’s say, or a painter. A quick comparison of the ingredients of the laborers’ and the elite’s salads actually reveals a certain preference to use mostly common vegetables, white cheese and olives in the first group, while the second group in most cases includes some kind of meat or meat products. The selection of the statuses perceived as relevant to the national cuisine/ culinary identity makes a strong case that not only the core, but the

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entire discourse on national identity, is borrowed from the pre-modern peasant society and culture. The intrinsic ‘Bulgarianness’ is sought and found within the traditions of the ethnographic and social bygone.

The Twenty-First-Century Image of Bulgarian National Cuisine My attempt to interpret the language of the national cuisine on the empirical material of restaurant salads is intended as a demonstration of the possibilities of the method, rather than as a set of hard arguments, leading to large-scale conclusions. And yet, similar readings of the other menu categories that were not included in this text give me some confidence to suggest that most of the observations will be confirmed, therefore I would like to proposes a few general observations with promising potential. The Bulgarian national restaurant cuisine exhibits at present an identifiable style, based on syntactic rules, recognised and adopted by the establishments, which offer ‘Bulgarian’ cuisine. The vocabulary of this national style is open, flexible, unproblematically contradictory (‘Chorbadzi saladlet’ (sic) with balsamic dressing (sic!)), as any live vocabulary is. Often it is impressively creative: we see the use of archaic words and archaic sounding words; of diminutives of nouns in unthinkable versions (‘saladlet’), wrongly spelled words that nobody cares about.22 The syntactic system, on the other hand, is deeply contradictory: the most visible self-presentations (the blurbs on the site) almost always speak of ‘gozba’ (archaic and intimate word for ‘dish’, with etymology in the Slavic and Indo-European ‘gost’ (guest), therewith clearly establishing a mental image of homeliness, grandmotherliness, slow cooking,23 everyday food, pre-modern times. The dishes actually served in the restaurants however are mostly grilled, meats, satchs, hayduts, that is, the manly, heroic, festive, a-la-minute, open to foreign tastes and the food industry.24 One participant in a Facebook group on restaurants even goes as far as saying: ‘no one cooks in the restaurants any more’. This is incorrect of course: in the 18 surveyed restaurants we see a number of slow-cooked dishes25 and still the persistent advertising of gozbas is in clear dissonance with the dominance of the salads, the grill, the satch and the meze. The discrepancy between marketing strategies (the brand) and the actual contents is resolved apparently in the sphere of

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the collective imaginary. The caterers adapt to the expectations of an audience, which likes national cuisine without bothering to question its Bulgarianness and authenticity. The consumers adapt and adjust their ideas about the national cuisine to the food they receive in the restaurants. The survey of a set of names, categories and menus of the bitovi establishments allowed us to see the outlines of the model of construing and selling national culinary culture: the assembling of menus consisting of freely selected authentic dishes, names, products and dishes peacefully coexisting with products, techniques and tastes of other national cuisines or the modern food industry and commerce; invented combinations of products and techniques, which at the same time stay in the realm of the familiar without taking the risks of experimentation. This hotchpotch however does not fall apart but is consolidated in an almost-uniform nomenclature and presentation. From the mass adoption of the satch as a mainstay of traditional cooking (incorrect) to the choice of print fonts and colour palette of the logo, we see a bona fide canon of the national-style restaurant cuisine. I would propose two possible and complementary interpretations of the observed situation. The first is related to the limitations and constraints of the restaurant cooking in general; the second, to the dictate of consumer expectations. Even those not familiar with the specificity of food preparation in restaurants know that cooks work with pre-prepared elements of the easily spoiled food. Only high-class restaurants with numerous staff could afford to cook each dish from scratch. The pressure to keep the prices affordable puts a lid on the aspirations to build a real restaurant kitchen with different stations. This circumstance immediately impoverishes the cuisine by excluding an entire range of dishes (several slow-cooking dishes, roasted whole meats, fresh eggs and dairy products, freshly baked pastries). The corrective pressure of the consumer demand is no less tangible. The restaurants offer dishes that are in demand and in mass demand. The Bulgarian public, lacking long-cultivated culinary tradition (interest in authenticity, in local brands and rarities and only nascent interest in food discourse) or, if we add a more damaging circumstance – a public socialised in a culinary tradition shaped by the central-planning egalitarian economy, does not seek authentic dishes with their original names and local ingredients. In addition, the sense and need to preserve the authentic cultural

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system is missing. The culinary culture is disintegrated and finds its identity in a limited number of individual significant elements, simulacra of the national, which turn to be sufficient in delivering the main objective of marketing the culture: offer ‘easily recognizable markers of ethnic identity’ (Lu, Fine, 1996: 536). Even if individual cooks and caterers have a genuine interest in authenticity, they know they cannot sell it. The consumer receives in the Bulgarian bitov establishment a version of the ‘Bulgarianness’ they expect and deserve.

Notes 1. The ethnographic literature is summarised in Etnografija na Balgaria, 1983; 2. For recent publications see Vukov, Ivanova 2010; Dechev, 2010. 2. Suffice it to mention William Robertson Smith (1889), Audry Richard (1939), Claude Le´vi-Strauss (1965), Mary Douglas (1995), Marcel Mauss (2001). For good review of the anthropological tradition and more recent publications see Di Giovine, Brulotte (2014). 3. The term is untranslatable; it is an adjective of ‘bit’, in Russian ‘быт’ – that segment of human life which comprises the satisfaction of material and spiritual needs. 4. http://zavedenia.com/ (Accessed 5 January 2015). 5. The data is from 23 – 25 January 2015. The numbers today may be different because of the dynamics of the field but the error is from one to five establishments. 6. The mehana (tavern) is ‘an establishment where alcoholic beverages are sold and consumed’, according to the Guidelines for cooking laborers (Danailova, 1966:31). 7. The Shopi are regional group in western Bulgaria. 8. Rhodope mountain is situated in the south-central part of Bulgaria; its southern slopes are in Greece. The mountain has rich history, interesting regional cuisine and culture. 9. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the period of cultural modernisation and nation-formation among Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire, known as ‘National Revival’ (Vazrazhdane). 10. Voivoda. Old Slavic, literally ‘war-leader’ or ‘war-lord’. 11. Gozba is an Old Slavic word for ‘disk’, ‘meal’. 12. My objective is not to discuss the social meaning of this ‘displaced meaning’ (McCracken, 1990:104 ff.) but I have no doubts that the observations I propose could provide ample food to study the collective psyche. 13. See Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983) about the increasing volume of domestic obligations for the housewife in the modern period (Cowan, 1983).

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14. See for instance ‘Lunches and dinner: what should I cook today?’ (Obedi i vecheri, 1942: 55) 15. The satch (from the Turkish sac, metal sheet) is a sturdy ceramic disk, used to bake breads and pancakes on open fire or charcoal. 16. The cookbooks published in Bulgaria before the 1990s mention just a few salads with names: Shopska, Shephards’, Garden and a few interesting exceptions (the Work company’s, Spring). 17. A village close to Veliko Tarnovo, medieval capital of Bulgaria. 18. The Turkish word Merakli is used. 19. A word that triggers an emotional response. 20. Neuhaus, Jessamyn (ed.) Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2003. 21. Greek for ‘shepherd’. 22. A non-representative survey among the Facebook friends of the author as to whether they find the diminutive designations of dishes appealing or repulsive generated more than 50 comments (https://www.facebook.com/search/top/? q¼Rayna%20Gavrilova%20%D1%83%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0% B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BD%D0%B8 of 22 January 2015), of which 30 were negative or critical, 10 neutral and only six positive. An interesting comment was ‘In restaurants with folk taste (sic!) it is OK’. 23. Najden Gerov defines gozba as ‘cooked dish’ (Gerov, 1, 230). 24. The observed restaurants offer pre-prepared ingredients (such as chicken parts, blanched potatoes, cheeses with seasoning). 25. Sarma (5), kebap (4), comlek (4), roasted stuffed whole lamb (11), stewed shin (10), kachamak (polenta) (6), cavarma (7), kapama (4).

CHAPTER 8 MAKING MODERN MONGOLIANS:GENDER ROLES AND EVERYDAY NATIONBUILDING IN CONTEMPORARY MONGOLIA Timofey Agarin and Lı¯ga Rudzı¯te

Students of post-socialist nation-building often forget a far away outpost of the Soviet regime wedged between the Soviet Union and China, yet Mongolia is a post-socialist society. During socialism, urbanisation, industrialisation and, as elsewhere, deportations of social and cultural elites were the primary tools of socialist nation-building, alongside availability of universal healthcare, education, consumer products and high culture. Many of these – though in a different form – are still widely available and cherished today, 25 years after Mongolia’s full independence from Soviet patronage. During this time, nation-building and toleration of nomadism have gone hand in hand with consolidation of its democratic regime. This brings us directly to the issue of nationbuilding for this society that is different from many other in the postsocialist domain: Mongolians have been around for a long time, but their experience of national statehood was imported by socialist ideologues in the 1920s. It was translated into the local vernacular and continues to impact the processes underlying the nation state, nation and regimebuilding after the socialism.

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It is widely accepted that nation-building is a process of constructing narratives (Hobsbawm 1992; and, especially, Klumbyte 2003). Similarly to other post-socialist places, in Mongolia these focus primarily on Mongolians’ past. Formal nation-building centres around the role of men in perpetuating Mongolian-ness, with traditions, legacies and rigid gender norms being communicated through familial socialisation of the new generation of Mongolians. We therefore ask how the roles ascribed to males and females acknowledge and contribute to the top-down nation-building in contemporary society. To do so, we provide an overview of claims laid bare by Mongolians about the uniqueness of their nation and this nation’s distinct features, something that is typical for all nation-building projects the world over. Then, we track down elements related to the cultural set-up, lifestyles and traditions as nation-building tools in Mongolia in general and in Mongolian families in particular. We map these variations onto gender practices where (as we believe) some practices allow the co-existence of traditional Mongolian customs with modern-day opportunities. We look particularly at the role of and expectations from women to identify the effects of people’s (unreflective?) practices on the larger project that the editors of this volume term ‘everyday nation-building’ (Seliverstova and Pawłusz 2016; Polese and Hora´k 2015; Isaacs and Polese 2015, 2016). This paper draws upon fieldwork conducted over the period of three months in 2012 in regions of Ulaanbaatar, Hovsgol, Arhangay and Henti, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, document analysis and cross-referenced informal conversations. Looking at the presence of ‘traditional’ nation-building instruments and the ways in which they are used to engage with gender categories, we explore how modern Mongolians identify as part of their nation state-bound culture. We conclude that these are but reflections of what many have previously assumed to be endemic to the European processes of social cohesion, forging strong national consciousness by subtle means and, ultimately, formal nation-building.

Building a Nation for Mongolians The socialist era is widely considered the time of active formation of the Mongolian state-nation. It gained particular importance throughout the 1920s when the new regime sought to craft a collective identity which

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could be useful for and supportive of the socialist political system. Therefore, when Christopher Kaplonski suggests that ‘socialists had inherited a state that was of relatively recent origin and was not clearly identifiable with the existing form of collective [i.e., national – authors] identity’ (Kaplonski 1998:35), it is clear that only with the establishment of a socialist state in Outer Mongolia can we attest the beginning of the Mongolian nationalism’s evolution. Nation-building in Mongolia during the socialist era was not much different from similar projects pursued by the Soviet rulers when dealing with (semi- and quasi-) nomadic people. Following Stalin’s dictum, new political and social regimes were more likely to prosper if ‘national in form and socialist in content’ (Stalin 1936). Not only did this mean that each ethnic group (natsionalnost’) had to have its own ethno-territorial homeland (in the case of Mongolians, a state de jure separate from the Soviet Union), but had to be bolstered with a set of national traditions and building upon a heroic past (Roy 2000). Particularly the national histories of (in the Soviet parlance) ‘backward nationalities’ were to reference peoples’ struggle against the external foes as well as internal oppressors. In the case of the Mongolia, this amounted to a rewriting of history away from ‘being about rulers and people to being about a people’ (Kaplonski 1998:35), elevating, for example, Sukhbaatar into the pantheon of heroic Mongolian figures. In his more recent work, Kaplonski observes that the understanding of what being Mongolian means today distinguishes between Mongolia of ‘tradition’ and that of ‘People’s Republic’ (Kaplonski 2000). However pivotal for construction of the nation, the state and the link between the two, the underpinnings of socialist reason for creating a Mongolian nation state is rarely perceived as being a part of citizens’ everyday experiences today. Instead, references to socialism as ‘the empty period’ are frequent in scholarship, as well as in everyday conversations. Similar to what Laura L. Adams observed in Uzbekistan (Adams and Rustemova 2009; Adams 1999), the state embraced the national ideology of the past as a prescription for the future; the breakdown of socioeconomic infrastructure in the early years of post-socialism additionally pushed Mongolian society into the fold of ideals about the nation which were formerly taboo. The socialist-time ideas were now turned on their head with commitment to sedentary lifestyles substituted by pastoral life,

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Buddhism replacing atheist practices and multiple everyday heroes yielded their place to Chenggis Khaan. It appears that precisely the three specific markers of community that the socialist regime was bent on eradicating provide the reference point in the contemporary national imagery precisely because the past regime sought to purge these from the public space. Thus (1) sets of references about Mongolians’ embeddedness in their natural environment (2) social and religious norms connecting individuals to diachronic community and crucially (3) the intergenerational equity of Mongolian people as is personified in the figure of Chenggis Khaan, all provide opportunities for modern-day Mongolians to engage with the traditional nationbuilding tools offered by the elites (Isaacs and Polese 2016). Forming national identity within particular spaces, through religious practices and through reference to a common historical figure are not new ways of matching a nation to a state, the purpose of nation-building as such, according to Abel Polese and Slavomir Horak (Polese and Horak 2016). Similarly, Sara L. Jackson suggests seeing nation-building as a process through which states attempt to convince a group about their shared identity and territory (Jackson 2015); this is done by providing a set of elements that people can choose to accept or discard as their identity markers (Isaacs and Polese 2016:9). The way people engage with these tools constitutes the everyday nation-building. The responses to the nation-building narratives often also translate into actions not initiated by the state, but aimed at strengthening the identity of the nation among other perceived group members. These Polese and Horak refer to as ‘spontaneous nation-building tools’ (Isaacs and Polese 2016:9). It is at the intersection of the traditional nationbuilding tools and the motivation and intent for putting spontaneous nation-building instruments to practice where we locate the contribution of this chapter. As we show, the return to traditional Mongolian-ness proceeds in concert with distinct views on social relationships and roles borne by male and female Mongolians, allowing men to take a lead in the everyday practice of nation-building, leaving women to either endorse the offered narrative in a supporting role or resort to what become spontaneous nation-building tools as a response to it. Thus when it comes to Mongolia, it is not only a question of how the ‘nation-building’ is being performed, but also of subjects undertaking these practices.

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We reference the actors in their identities which appear to bear the most weight in their day-to-day interactions, that is, as individuals with distinct gendered characteristics, interests and identities. The sets of expectations set out by the Mongolian society from men and women offers the background to practices which individuals ought to perform to qualify for and be accepted as Mongolians. When talking of ‘men’ and ‘women’ we merely refer to social categories deployed in the process of nation-building (Brubaker 2004). Only individuals belonging to a nation can engage in everyday reinterpretation of norms without challenging national traditions. This analytical approach helps us focus on substantive issues in, rather than on process of or relations between the subjects of this day-to-day nation-building when reflecting on gender-specific roles in Mongolian nation-building.

Nomadism as Practice of Everyday Nation-Building When Mongolia steered towards a market economy during the early 1990s, much of the population experienced significant challenges in regards to their lifestyles and chains of supplies. The economy of the country experienced high levels of inflation as well as food shortages, which were particularly pronounced in urban areas where the vast majority of citizens lived while working in factories and in socialist services. Later, as the reforms of 1990 resulted in disbandment of negdels (i.e., Mongolian kolkhozes), many Mongolians chose to ‘go back to their roots’: take over the livestock and set off into the steppe, re-assuming their nomadic lifestyle, despite the lack of experience with herding. When reflecting on these experiences today, many of our respondents suggest that their decisions were meant to reclaim their history, cashing in on the opportunity to live the purity of Mongolian-ness and lead a life in accordance with tradition. Today, around two-fifths of the Mongolian population lead nomadic lives.1 This represents the connection of Mongolians to nature, their herds and spirits of the land. Nomadism embodies the bravery and hardships of living in the Mongolian steppe and dealing with the rough weather conditions. These have hardly changed since the times of Chenggis Khaan and the ideals of those days long past are re-lived by experiencing nomadism. Even people who had never herded, but whose relatives were still living in the steppe, would regularly articulate this

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connection in conversations, establishing themselves as a part of the Mongolian nation. In a conversation with the President of Mongolia, Ts. Elbegdorj stressed that Mongolians were a nomadic nation and few non-Mongolians would survive the harsh conditions of the steppe.2 Stories and ideas similar to these have become the ‘truths’ – something worth telling about Mongolian nation from childhood. Return to a steppe life meant also a return to the ‘traditional’ division of labour within households: While men are the ones herding the animals, spending time away from the ger, females are the ones that usually stay around the hearth and ger, making fire, cooking food, taking care of small children. Herding as means of production by the nomadic people is thus associated with men who are in charge of the success or failure of the household to ensure their livelihood. But the expectations from women extend beyond their traditional roles once families need to secure their livelihoods due to increasing unreliability of herding as a source of sustenance. International development organisations and families themselves then look for ways to engage women in additional economic activity. Women are approached by development agents to introduce agricultural practices next to herding, but this is often met with a great scepticism from women themselves. A more accepted approach practised by many families is sending their daughters to school for longer to improve their chances for better occupation and as a result better the economic status of the family. This trend has increased over time and today about 70 per cent of all students in tertiary education are female. Though this will result in long-term high levels of female employment,3 we believe that it is families, not women, who view prolonged spells in education as an opportunity for better employment in cities and expect that these will retranslate into family’s economic welfare. Aude Michelet suggests that the friction between the expected gender roles and the new realities of the increasing numbers of women becoming the main bread-winners in families and contributing less within the ‘female domain’ have a potential to create tensions in households (Michelet 2015). With the increased participation of women in labour market, sharing of household chores by men has been losing much of its past stigma.4 Though encouraging in itself, equal participation of Mongolians of both genders in domestic labour is postponed by the belief (shared among men and women) that home (ger)

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is still the female purview, while men should remain herders, even if with varying results in terms of income. Both reluctance to take up agricultural practices and the tensions around the gendered tasks around the ger are closely connected to the narrative that describes Mongolians as nomads that should lead nomadic lifestyle. Three decades ago, Anatolii Khazanov observed that even those nomads who had moved to villages and cities often thought of sedentarisation as an interim stage of their lives and that they would return to nomadic way of life at the first opportunity (Khazanov 1983:84). In the interviews one of us conducted with an international development organisation in 2012 it was often mentioned that Mongolians, men and women, believed that nomadism was ‘in their bones and blood’ irrespective of the overwhelming numbers of sedentary Mongolians. The return to nomadism is often romanticised as being part and parcel of Mongolian history and tradition. The embeddedness of nomadism in nature provides a space where the history and tradition can be practised as uniquely ‘national’. Among others, Tim Edensor proposes to look at the complex ways that the nation is ‘spatialised’ through institutional and everyday practices: how elements of national space constitute symbolic geographies, creating spatial entities out of ‘nations’ (Edensor 2002:65). And the national spaces that lay claims to symbolic power, are also replicated in local contexts, used by people as part of their repertoire of everyday practices. This is reflected in the Mongolian context, where nomadic landscapes and practices around them form the core of proposed idea of the nation, even if most people are not directly linked to nature any longer. Khazanov asserts that one of the main characteristics of ‘proper’ nomadism in Mongolia has been the disinclination to undertake anything other than pastoral activities (Khazanov 1983). The reluctance to take up agriculture is synonymous for Mongolians with affirming their belonging to the ‘nomadic stock’ and the fact that plot holding is not ‘in their bones’.5 It would be more appropriate to see the return of the view of nomadism as the virtuous lifestyle inside the parameters of post-socialist, everyday nation-building. It is also more in line with the re-invigorated view of the virtuous national characteristics which leave no space for practices traditionally associated with the settled life.

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It is worth noting that many practices underlining the uniqueness of the Mongolian nation reference past experiences of the people who traditionally led a pastoral lifestyle and were on the move throughout most of the past centuries. However, during the socialist era most Mongolian families led a settled lifestyle and such a reference – however tentative – to the pastoral lifestyle of Mongolians marks a significant contrast to ideas and ideals of the socialist time in the country. Thus nomadism is quintessential to Mongolians’ self-image as a people connected to their natural environment, even if they do not practise it themselves. Therefore, even if not everyone practises herding, Mongolians still refer to themselves as nomads, even if – as has been observed by Gaby Bamana – they live in townships (Bamana and Se˙nde˙nzhavyn 2008). Here economic struggles and opportunities have created space for different narratives of nation.6 The view that nomadism is essential to practising Mongolian-ness is widely accepted across Mongolia. Keeping a relation to the land and land-based lifestyles is a tool offered and accepted for consolidating the sense of a nation. It coincides with men’s responsibility around the house and within the community. Women are imagined in this narrative only in a supportive role, often giving them space to practice the complimentary, sedentary lifestyle, which is not a part of the national normativity and thus also escapes any possibility of alterations to the original narrative.

Forging Ties to the Nation via Religious Practices Though Buddhism arrived in Mongolia from the Manchu, it is perceived by Mongolians as a local religious tradition amalgamating shamanism (such as involving spirits), norms of conduct with community (such as practices of hospitality) and sets norms for communal relations (such as the requirement to cooperate). Buddhism alongside shamanism continues to play an important role in the everyday and provides the backdrop for feelings of unity, if not outright homogeneity among the Mongolians. Though many Mongolian norms associated with Buddhism fell prey to socialist modernisation, many local traditions were continuously called into peoples’ everyday and private lives despite being frowned upon in public (Kaplonski 2015). Therefore, when following the demise of socialism there was a need to re-define the

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features of Mongolians which could be used for nation-building ‘after the break’, many practices and traditions quietly observed in private came to use. Looking back into the past allowed the tapping into sets of ‘traditional’ elements of lifestyle, often leading to new combinations of those elements in common imagery (See, e.g., Sabloff 2001). Many of these related to quasi-religious practices that connected the living individuals with the spirits believed to be able to harm individuals and households if not negotiated with. One of the central ways of soliciting protection of the household and people residing in the area surrounding has been traditionally – in socialism, as well as in post-socialist times – organised in ritualised practices around ovoos. Ovoos are places believed to offer a location for people to access and negotiate with ‘land masters’: spirits. As such, they are usually positioned on top of mountains and are important places for ceremonies that reflect the common responsibility of people for their joint wellbeing. As all misfortunes befalling individuals are seen as having been caused in one way or another by spirits, it is the responsibility of all members of community to negotiate with them and requiring ritualistic offerings to assuage spirits. Morten Axel Pedersen describes that the ovoo ceremonies before socialism used to be bound up with the social reproduction of patrilocal clans, as the men of the surrounding kin groups would be the ones performing the annual rituals, thus reconfirming their belonging to the land they lived on (Pedersen 2012). Ovoos therefore represent a location for connecting with the diachronic community as well as with the spirits that are affecting the immediate kin of Mongolians. During socialism, ovoo ceremonies were forbidden and ovoo places were formally stripped of all spiritual meaning. This did not prevent people from adding pebbles and stones to ovoos, claiming it as a superstition if not a spiritual practice (Endicott 2012). Today, outside of a ritualistic ceremony, it is considered important for Mongolians driving past an ovoo to stop and offer something to spirits. The communal space around ovoos offers another site for performing a Mongolian nation through a practice of the common religion. Here, as in herding, the effectiveness of the nation-building tool relies mostly on men, including the sedentary Mongolians, taking part in the annual ovoo ceremonies at different locations across the country. Individuals congregate to engage in joint acts of protecting their people from

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spirits as part of a collective act of shared responsibility (Pedersen 2011). Women, though at times taking part in the ceremonies, are not responsible for negotiating with spirits in this particular way, keeping them to more home- and hearth-related spiritual practices, e.g. offering tea in libations to spirits, a practice less exposed to public eye. Thus women engage in religious practices as part of the everyday nationbuilding, however these are much smaller scale, home-bound, not engaging with the community or any group larger than the immediate family. The lack of explicit communal significance provides opportunities for women’s spiritual practices to be less traditionbound and more adaptable to different new situations, e.g. moving to an apartment in a city, forming a space for intersection of traditional narratives and modern lifestyles. This space is present rather in women’s nation-building performances than in men’s, but as the gendered practices do not seem to intersect within the formal narrative, the traditional narrative seems to run parallel to the modern lives.

Chenggis Khaan Legacies Since the early 1990s, the link of every Mongolian to Chenggis Khaan has been re-established, reproduced and re-embedded in objects, events and joint celebrations. His depictions blazon national consumer products such as beer, vodka, meat, matchboxes, as well as adorn public spaces across Mongolia: large statues have been erected in Ulaanbaatar and Tsonjin Bolgod, Ulaanbaatar’s international airport carries his name, as do the various businesses around the country from wedding saloons to shops, from restaurants to night locales. Chenggis Khaan’s figure inspires also the return to herding celebrations (Tsagaan Sar) and wrestling competitions (Naadam). On the day of Naadam people crowd the streets of Ulaanbaatar and meet to go to the stadium or racing tracks to watch wrestling, horse racing and archery. These have a strong connection to the Chenggis legacy and represent the Mongolian identity through the sports played mainly by men, reconfirming the values of traditional manhood and linking men with his victorious army. Manly games are said to have been played as celebrations after successful battles during and since Chenggis Khaan; they were re-organised into sporting competition after the 1921 Revolution in an effort to enhance national spirit. Similarly, after the

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1990s, Naadam and related games have experienced a revival with increasing numbers of sportswomen taking part alongside men, although only within the discipline of archery. The Mongolian New Year’s celebrations Tsagaan Sar (White Moon) is an important holiday marking the inauguration of Chenggis Khaan and as such also the birth of the nation. Importantly, it is also a family- and home-centred celebration. Tsagaan Sar is often referred to as a celebration of kinship requiring visits among peoples’ kin both in cities and in rural areas (Sauer 2001; Humphrey 1992). It is therefore the space where social relations can be formed and reproduced (Højer 2004). As a traditional event that was not recognised by the socialist authorities and was not celebrated publicly during socialist rule, it regained popularity after 1990 as a token of national celebration but also as a model event where people could reconvene and reconfirm social ties. Favouring Buddhist faith (or so it is told) and clad in traditional clothes, Chenggis was and remains the only candidate for the figure of father of the nation in Mongolia (Kaplonski 1998:42). Albeit there are notions of ‘motherland’ that some scholars have identified during the period of socialism, the socialists’ effort at building a civic, sedentary and modern nation in contrast to the peripatetic, traditional and, as such, backward Mongolian put the Great Khaan in the firing line of socialist ideologues. He did play a part in the Soviet narrative of Mongolian history, but his role therein resembled that of a backward and traditionalist leader of a nomadic nation (Kaplonski 2015). Currently Chenggis legacies are more often connected to features of ‘undisturbed modernity’ and he like no other represents the spirit of unity among this peripatetic nation and the wide steppe (Humphrey 1992). In discussions and interviews with Mongolians they often mentioned the establishing of diplomatic immunity, common currency, equal access to judiciary for all people, free trade, common international law and inter-religious dialogue as Chenggis’ lasting contribution to Mongolian legacies. The symbolic figure of the former leader of Mongolians is fused with both the religious and pastoral traditions of Mongolians, further legitimising his pivotal status in the toolbox of nation-building. It is therefore unsurprising to see the figure of Chenggis Khaan incorporated into the narratives on Mongolian-ness and underpinning the official narrative of nation state building in Mongolia, be it in everyday practices, in consumer products, in services and referred to in people’s

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actions. Chenggis is also at the centrepiece of altars in people’s homes: the space that used to be designated to Buddhist altars before socialism, today contains representations of the great leader with oil lamps and incense, as well as personal inscriptions tailored to the private understanding of the importance of Chenggis Khaan to the household members (Humphrey 1992). Framing the ‘national’ history around a leader and establishing a collective memory of the particular historical figure are often coupled with a personality cult towards the leader. The effects of the personality cult in Turkmenistan as discussed by Polese and Horak (2016) closely resemble those we observe in Mongolia and related to the figure of Chenggis Khaan, projecting Mongolians’ past experience onto the present and situating them firmly in the familial contexts. Thus, combining traditional and spontaneous nation-building tools casts a much wider net for popular support to the central historical figure as is the case in Turkmenistan. Here, the legacy of Chenggis is the main source and the central reference point for the emergent identity of the nation. However, it is mostly men who are expected to participate in and steer the ceremonies as they used to be done, or so it is believed, during the times of Chenggis. Unsurprisingly, thus, masculinity is often equated with the virtues that Great Khaan apparently had: having a strong and resilient body, being able to wrestle and drink copious amounts of alcohol (Bille and Kaplonski 2015). The manly games enhance the role of masculinity in nationalist discourse. These reflect on Mongolians’ understanding of themselves as part of a nation based on traditional ways of life, living in the countryside, taking care of five types of livestock (horses, cattle, sheep, goats, camels), negotiating relationships with the land spirits – all placed mainly in manly realm by the gendered division of labour. There is, however, some mention of women in the narratives connected to Chenggis Khaan too. The much-read Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World recounts a story about women in Chenggis Khaan’s life and, through that, in the Mongol empire as such. Ho’elun, his mother and especially his wife Borte, are portrayed as important figures and, while not in a position to make decisions, they shape the rationale of Chenggis’ decisions. For example, the tale of Ho’elun teaching her sons to stand together rather than apart,

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‘because separate arrows can be broken more easily’, not only translates into tactics to be used in battles. It is also widely indicative of an ideal relationship between members of the same kin, as well as the role and influence of women as holders of sagacity which they can – and are expected to – put to use over hot-headed men, helping with making decisions appropriate for the kin. Weatherford took the task to continue placing women within the narrative through his later book too: The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, which the author built around ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’, claiming that sections referring to the might of women in the Mongol empire went missing in the book. The book on Mongol queens; however, is not nearly as widely read and referred to as the Chenggis Khaan one. And yet, it reflects on the efforts to include women in the traditional narratives of the nation, even if only through their relationship with men.

Contribution of Women to Mongolian Everyday Nation-Building The pivotal role of Chenggis Khaan in the national narrative makes men responsible for playing the key role and as such entrusts them with upholding the virtues of the nation, while women feature only in supporting positions throughout. The division of labour with clear tasks and ritualised behaviours facilitates conformism with everyday nationbuilding and maintains avenues for recreating routines underpinning formal nation-building. At the same time, this rigidity opens avenues for women to tacitly challenge tradition where necessary. Only some women’s roles are prescribed by men and they make their own decisions about the family, e.g., by initiating a divorce (Terbish 2013). Also, as women do not take their spouse’s name, this ensures that children identify as belonging to the mother as well as to the father (Michelet 2015). This, suggests Paula Sabloff, allows men to maintain connection with their mothers throughout their lives (Sabloff 2001). This gives space for women to negotiate with men their role in nation-building also in terms of traditional tools and how they are applied across generations. Traditionally, women have been free to choose their partners in Mongolian society, an obligation rather than a practice to facilitate nation-building. Upon completing formal education, women are often

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pressured to either find employment or a husband or rather both, soon after their graduation. For many young educated women the choice of a spouse proves a difficult one. Those men embodying the ideals of ‘pure’ Mongolians and performing the practices constituting the nation as discussed previously are often a mismatch for educated women desiring to make their living in the comfort of the city. Thus, while pastoral men might come across as ideal and suitable for perpetuating the image of a nomadic nation, modern Mongolian women often target men with similar educational and professional pathways and rather city-bound lifestyles. There are simply not enough of them for everyone deserving, increasingly leading women to postpone marital arrangements despite the rising societal pressures and stigma of childlessness.7 Thus women rather resort to avoid engaging with the traditional narratives altogether rather than changing them beyond household. Along with the responsibility to ensure the continuation of the Mongolian nation, this has put the pressure on men, rather than on women, to procure and multiply the stock of the Mongolian nation regardless of the availability or of the willingness of women to marry. Thus, and similarly to other societies reversing changes that took place during ‘socialist modernity’, some Mongolian men take up the responsibility of safeguarding the purity of Mongolian nation from the extreme opposite of Mongolian-ness: an influx of foreign blood into the ‘veins of the nation’. These sentiments are directly translated into attitudes of dislike of and avoidance of foreigners, though not being directly related to perceived threats to the existence of the nation (Billie´ 2015). It has been reported that groups claiming to ‘protect the nation’ are punishing Mongolian women spotted together with foreigners.8 These attacks against the women have often been referred to in personal communication as ‘understandable’, even if not ‘legitimate’ in the light of the threat to a ‘nation’ being posed by the opportunistic foreigners, especially by the Chinese. As in other social contexts where the traditional mechanisms of social cohesion are eroding, it is Mongolian men who can and do assume their role as modern-day Chenggis Khaans, delivering on the expectations impressed upon them by society returning to the pre-socialist ideals of nomadic kinship, ties with the nature and heroism in the face of external adversaries. These acts of men (and in some cases, women) serve as examples of a ‘spontaneous nation-building’ practices where a group acts

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out on their own conviction of what constitutes a nation. Some of these nation-building practices rely on male experiences of memory, humiliation and hope that are in fact efforts to protect the nation. Here, the women are the ones invoking these feelings, especially humiliation and hope and therefore appear to be in need of protection, often from themselves in the name of the nation (Nagel 1998). This further illustrates the point that the traditional nation-building tools are gendered in their message and approach and as such are being used by those whose status is more secure in societal hierarchies. The perceived need of the nation for protection is seen in most traditional societies as an appropriate way to impose rigid social norms on women in the name of the ‘national’. As such, Mongolian men are tasked with sustaining ‘their’ nation because ethnicity is passed through the father’s bloodline, making men – not women – responsible for reproducing the nation (Bille and Kaplonski 2015). Thus, while women are exposed to fewer pressures to re-enact Mongolian ideals, there is continuous expectation to comply with despite complaining about expectations from the kin which constitute everyday nation-building guided by traditional roles for men, as well as for women (Mayer 2000). The impact of top-down nation-building in public on what is believed to be of import for private individuals has been effectively penetrating practices in domains away from the public eye. The importance of community-conforming behaviours has been exacerbated by the hard landing of the economy, which made the roles traditionally exercised in and guarded by the kin obligatory for families to maintain viable social and economic ties. This allowed family and community to exercise pressures similar to those of social and national cohesion on representatives of both genders in Mongolia and pressed for the return to status quo ante and ‘traditional’ roles after the demise of ‘socialist modernity’. In the Mongolian case, women are relegated to assistants of men in everyday nation-building. Although housework is largely a female responsibility: keeping the fire and preparing the food, making choices about what is being consumed, purchased and sold, women remain agents of nation-building in the ger only. No doubt, there is some leverage that they can attain when raising the new generation of Mongolians; at home they are the primary agents of socialisation for children and have considerable potential to bring about the flexibility into interpretations of nation community and family.

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The gendered nature of nation-building is not new to academic scholarship; the feminist literature on nations and nationalism sees production of gendered hierarchies central to any nation-building efforts. That women’s supporting role in nation-building is not claimed by women themselves, but relegated upon them by men has long been a research agenda. Some studies suggest that exclusion of active female participation from the nation-building borne by men relegates women to actors maintaining tradition, defined in either ethnic or national terms. In her study of nationalism in South Korea, Laura C. Nelson finds that the roles of women in nation-building were gendered and limited to heterosexual maternal roles, even though women performed the same labour roles as men (Nelson 2000). Similarly, the increase of female participation in public life outside their ‘traditional’ domain has not translated into their increased visibility in the formal nation-building practices in Mongolia. As stressed by Bille´ , the nationbuilding discourse in Mongolia is not only sexist, but also highly heteronormative (Billie´ 2015). Along these lines women often engage with the established attitudes towards building a nation, but they are involved with social norms that are ambiguous at best, counterproductive at worse, as they validate the masculinity enwrapping the nation-building. Mongolian society is not particularly unique in that its men are challenging ‘their’ women’s independence and act on women’s choices when these align badly with traditions re-established after the end of the (no doubt, pro forma) socialist gender equality. We claim that it is not only the return to the ‘traditional modernity’ of pre-socialist Mongolia that has been (successfully?) resurrected and emphasises the ger-centred lifestyle of the steppe nomad as a proxy connection to the great legacy of Chenggis Khaan. The resultant narrative does explain why Mongolian men perceive women to be at particular risk of becoming an object of foreign malicious intent and requires a wholesale return to ‘history’ before it took ‘time off’ under the socialist regime. However, this narrative does so at the expense of reducing men to irrational actors at the service of the national collectivity, tasked with protection of ‘Mongolian bones and blood from intermixture with the foreign’ and thus legitimising their actions as sets of fundamentally traditionalist commitments. It also reduces women to passive subjects, not active actors with agency.

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This view of the return to gendered perceptions of the public space is part and parcel of the reversed social ordering of national hierarchies. During the socialist era, gender equality was seen as a tool to aid modernisation of Mongolian society as a whole. But economic hardship of the early post-socialist years – rather than the culturally determined preferences for nomadism – have driven hordes of Mongolians out of urban spaces and forced many to return to nomadism as something most of them believed they could do best. Indeed, while for some the return to nomadism meant fewer social pressures and offered greater and more familiar, structure to social interactions, those Mongolians remaining in cities found it no less challenging to negotiate their obligations vis-a`-vis family members, community and the nation as a whole. Linking what is valuable and what is valued for both men and women in the maintenance of national collectivity is at the centre of the everyday nation-building in Mongolia. While the transition from socialism has been hailed as an example of successful building of a nation on distinctly non-European foundations, it becomes increasingly clear that the everyday experiences of nation-building are deeply affected by the exposure to Western thinking: when it comes to the role of a singular leader and male tutelage of the social order, the role of pre-socialist ‘traditional modernity’ and of the ‘place for the nation’ in nature – there are multiple parallels to nation-building processes in other post-socialist regions, e.g., in the Baltic States.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the unanticipated impact that the view of men as agents of the Chenggis Khaan tradition has on opportunities for women to engage with and change the societal and cultural norms forming the core of Mongolian nation-building. We set this claim in the context of nation-building in Mongolia but looked specifically at the role allocated to women in this context; we searched for the space females could carve out for themselves to pick and choose from the toolbox of national identities believed to be glorious and predominantly nomadic. Therefore while it is ultimately women who pick and choose what is being promoted and passed on to their children in the context of limited social contacts in the steppe, few take up opportunities to raise children outside the canon of the acceptable to the ideal-bound Mongolian.

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As such, to be mothers and raise the new generation of Mongolians, many women have already attained higher levels of education than men. They are also more vocal when it comes to making strategic choices about what is important for children, e.g., by ensuring that they too are accessing education and are at ease with a combination of more traditional and more modern ways of life, regardless of where they live. We expected to see Mongolian women as agents of social change who transform and update the meanings of what it means to be a modern Mongolian not despite, but because of their gender or indeed their projected gender roles. But, of course, we are far remote from an overtly unrealistic perception which exempts women from the social and cultural context in which they themselves have been raised and socialised. All Mongolian women are themselves the products of their mothers’ socialisation to seek out and embrace change under socialism, something that explains the increasing drift into urban spaces by those females who do not want to or cannot adapt to expectations placed on them in the steppe. Indeed, for many, moving into towns and accessing higher education is nothing but an avenue for leaving and not challenging the traditional Mongolian ways, particularly those norms and traditions staked up for and by men. So we gain an impression that it is inside the households and by means of mothering the modern Mongolians that some parts of Mongolian society circumvent the Chenggis Khaan-focused narrative of nationhood without explicitly challenging it. Women can do so by selectively choosing those aspects of Mongolian nationhood that are readily available to pass on to their children and as such combine the sets of past norms and traditions, that are already driving post-socialist nation-building, as well as societal modernisation. Whereas men are constrained in envisaging their choices, we have claimed that women’s role in the nation-building is contingent on opportunities they determine for themselves as there is little of traditional, that is, culturally prescriptive, norms that regulate their choices and little of that is independent of men’s roles. This is because both the socialist and post-socialist eras have offered women greater choices both at home (in gers and in communities), in public and at the interface of the two (in choices of education, maintaining relationships with men and raring children). These should have put the prospect for the modern Mongolian nation firmly into women’s hands and allowed

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them to have a powerful impact on the future direction and speed of social change in Mongolian society. However, in reality they do not; our chapter has explored some of the reasons for which nation-building remains an implicitly male domain in Mongolia, specifically through engagement with traditional and well-accepted gendered nationbuilding tools.

Notes 1. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, Czech Development Cooperation 2012. Available at www.mzv.cz/file/1057324/Czech_development_cooperati on_web_EN.pdf (Accessed 25 September 2016). 2. During UNAOC Fourth Global Forum, Doha, Qatar, 12 December 2011. 3. Tsolmon Begzsuren & Dolgion Aldar, Gender Overview Mongolia: Desk Study (2014). Available at https://www.eda.admin.ch/content/dam/countries/ countries-content/mongolia/en/SDC-Gender-%20Overview-Mongolia-% 202014-EN.pdf (Accessed 25 September, 2016). 4. Franck Bille´ and Christopher Kaplonski, Mongolia: Unravelling the Troubled Narratives of a Nation. Available at http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/m ongolia-unravelling-the-troubled-narratives-of-a-nation (Accessed 15 October 2016). 5. Jack Weatherford connects this to the heritage of Chenggis Khaan, as he led the fight of nomads against the ‘civilised’ world – sedentary populations, above all, the farmers. Though according to Weatherford this fight continues ‘in the minds of Mongolians,’ (Weatherford 2004, 264). 6. Jackson reflects on this in her work on the role of mining companies in nationbuilding in Mongolia and the popular rejection of the vision of modern Mongolian nation through development via resource-extraction. Mongolians rather see mineral excavation and harvesting minerals as antithetical to national customs and rely on traditional narratives about their relationships with the land to forge perceptions about the ‘space of a nation’. Jackson, ‘Imagining the mineral nation: contested nation-building in Mongolia’. 7. As Franck Bille´ notes on his fieldwork, childlessness was often seen as a curse, not as an informed choice (Billie´ 2015). 8. Though the radical nationalist groups operating along these interpretations of national purity exist mainly in Ulaanbaatar, similar actions have been told to have happened in other cities, too.

CONCLUSION WHEN POST-SOCIALISM MEETS THE EVERYDAY Abel Polese, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Emilia Pawłusz and Jeremy Morris

We started this book to fill what we saw as a surprising gap. In spite of a voluminous literature on post-socialism in which identity represents a major direction and in spite of an emerging attention to everyday identities, the two approaches rarely met. Indeed, browsing through electronic resources and catalogues we have found a lot on identities, but everyday identities were studied only by a minority of younger scholars. It would be unfair, though, to claim that little or nothing exists on the topic. The everyday is a term that has come to popularity recently. A number of scholars, including on post-socialism, have helped us in shaping our approach for this book (see, for example, Humphrey 2002; Laitin 1998; Rausing 2004; Wanner 2010), even if they have not mentioned the everyday in their approach or title. We were lucky, in our search, to be approached by and to be able to identify a number of young and more senior scholars who were either working on the everyday in the region or were fascinated by our approach to the point to propose a chapter. Their diversity of approaches has helped us to reshape our ideas and also to expand the scope of our research to aspects of the everyday that we had not considered before. By doing this, we hope to have been able to make for expanding the parameters for academic scrutiny of social integration and identity

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construction at the everyday level with particular attention to postsocialist societies. There is much research on the relationship between identity and everyday practices beyond the region and in particular in the Western world. But this does little justice to a variety of practices that we observe and that seem to us idiosyncratic to post-socialist spaces, to the point of justifying them as a special category, at least for empirical studies. We hope, by doing this, to be able to challenge and then contribute to the general debates on the issue. Emphasis on top-down institutional and political approaches to understanding identities sometimes obscures the multifaceted ways in which the construction of identity happens at the everyday level. This was the rationale behind expanding the scope of our investigations to consider and integrate more ‘banal’ forms of nationalism, more people-centred modes of consuming identities so as to integrate the micro with the macro, the institutional and the societal, the formal and the informal. While we have noticed a tendency to dismiss or underplay these practices as insignificant, it is time to acknowledge that individuals have latitude to perform their national identities in complex ways. The never-ending civic-ethnic debate ascribes voluntary practices to civic attitudes, as opposed to essentialistic views on the nation (Breton, 1988). By making the case for the value of ordinary people’s consumption we illustrate the capacity of ethnic nationalism to evolve into a voluntary, and therefore more civic, phenomenon. This call for a focus on bottom-up phenomena is in no way intended to underplay the role of the state. Our book concentrates on the everyday level as a domain in which we study processes of nationalism and the agency of ordinary people in them, but all these behaviours evolve and spread in a context that is defined culturally, territorially and administratively by a given state. Citizens may reproduce, affirm and even amplify ideas on nation generated by political elites. But it is important to keep in mind the existence of an everyday unspoken and complicit dialogue between the state and its people, although both parts might, from time to time, forget about the existence of such complicities and synergies. By so doing we wish to integrate that body of nation-building literature that had tendencies to ignore or simply failed to acknowledge the role of the people in identity-formation processes, as opposed or at

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least integrating state-originated measures. Not only are people able to adapt to what a state proposes, they also have the capacity to contest, renegotiate and, in some case, to oppose them. If not as organised forms of resistance, for instance through politicisation of an issue, then at least silently in their mundane life. If we start from this view, we can justify the fact that sometimes a pop song of a local band, a homemade meal or the familiar sound of a bothersome TV advertisement can evoke stronger patriotic or nationalistic feelings than any official national symbol or a public celebration of an official holiday. Such small details found in everyday life remain often unnoticed and thus not worth attention. However, several authors have already warned us that the incapacity to notice them, the fact that these aspects are seen as ‘natural’, part of our daily life, is their real strength (Billig 1995; Fox 2016; Skey 2011). They penetrate and embed our daily life to the point that we stop noticing them or notice them only when they become absent, which then becomes perceived as the ‘unnatural’ state. Everyday practices, particularly the very basic ones, are common all over the world. What makes a difference is the way people perform them and in the belief that they do so in a unique way for their community. This book has been an attempt to reassess the role of people’s agency, manifested through daily choices of non-political and non-politicised actors, to suggest that even simple actions, if performed by a sufficient number of people, can have an impact on national identity. The key question here is what number is ‘sufficient’, since, as Connor (2004) pointed out, there is no accepted, or acceptable, benchmark telling us how many people need to accept an identity or a marker before a community can consider itself a nation. However, by highlighting the problem of scale, our assumption is that it is possible to go beyond existing approaches in nationalism studies that tend to focus on phenomena of great social and political magnitude – wars, conflicts, break-ups of empires. In spite of their attractiveness and their obvious explanatory value, these approaches tend to ignore micro processes and routine practices in which identities or at least markers, are sustained (Thompson 2001). In this respect, the chapters in this book shed light on the importance of the everyday, whose focus is highly valuable, in particular when formal identity markers proposed by the state and elites prove

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insufficient. Such markers can be renegotiated or rejected or be in a state of contestation that involves several various social or cultural groups. Ultimately, the chapters in this book suggest that an inquiry into the everyday allows us to unpack this contestation and unravel alternative identity choices or alternative sources of its production that are meaningful for some parts of society. In the light of this, we have argued that identity construction is also a mundane, quotidian practice that emerges from practice more so than theory. The fact that it can be regarded as unconscious, casual or unintentional does not deny its social importance. As was noted some years ago, if all informants come to the same conclusion and ascribe this identity choice to chance, then chance alone cannot explain this outcome. For example, in the post-socialist context, the migration to Ukrainian identity in the city of Odessa happened and this was mentioned by all informants in the given study, after a particular episode in each informant’s life (Polese 2009, 2010). Each episode was distinct, leading them to think that this conversion was the byproduct of chance. However, when every single individual moves in the same direction, social scientists rarely talk of chance and look for hidden or latent patterns, that most likely are invisible not because they are not there but because have not been discovered yet. Our daily choices of a certain product, hobby or participation in a cultural activity may embed a cultural or identity choice that, underpinned by our attitude, remains invisible, subconscious, unnoticed but also tacitly accepted by us or others and is, therefore, reinforced by the fact that we do not see anything special in a particular choice (Fox 2016). By force of this, the very concept of identity construction, but also nation-building, can integrate a number of elements that have emerged throughout this book. First, we see a continuous line between formal and informal actors (see Eriksen 1993 for formal and informal nationalism) but also factors that frame people’s understanding of the nation. In other words, in a framework looking at inclusion-exclusion mechanisms and dynamics, which are crucial for the definition of national community, both the political and the (apparently) nonpolitical matter. Our post-functionalist view allows us to suggest that identity-construction is a practice (thus identity performance) rather than a mere teleological process with a pre-defined end goal (beyond functionalism). By doing this, we acknowledge that the process of

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identity-formation is contested, fractured and, although ‘hot’ at times (Ehala and Zabrodskaya 2014; Polese 2014), influenced by macro but also micro processes contained in daily routine that may be regarded as mundane or even apparently uneventful. Ultimately, individual and collective identities are informed by a synergy of one’s own personal experience, embedded in the society that the individual lives in and the reaction of the society to the declaration or acknowledgement of a given identity. Acknowledging the role of the individual is crucial to our discourse and approach, suggesting that to understand identity construction and negotiation we need to attend to the individual. We do not claim here to have exhausted all the possible directions of research for the everyday. Rather, we hope that our approach has helped to shed light on the need for further research and for a better understanding of the interactions between the individual and society and how this affects identity at large. Our main focus has been the postsocialist world for two reasons. One is that such approaches have remained largely underexploited in our target region. The other is that, as others have indicated (Caldwell 2002; Humphrey 2002), the region has much potential to contribute to the debate on why everyday practices, such as consumption or use of certain practices, products and ideas can ultimately influence national identity. This leads us to suggest the need for more embedded studies and a larger use of qualitative methodologies, in order to appreciate the fact that identity is a dynamic phenomenon and may at times fluctuate. If we were to suggest a departure point, we could say that it is worth devoting more attention to the increasing importance of popular culture, Internet and social media as political arenas are important for self-definition, especially in the context of contestation of what the state says.

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INDEX

Antimaidan, 110, 112– 13 Balkan party, 129– 30 Balkanness, 130, 136 Barthes, Roland, 84, 146, 149 Belarus, 85– 90, 96 – 102 belonging, strategies of, 18, 27, 29, 33 Bender (Tighina), 45 Bessarabia, 42, 46 – 7, 55 – 6 bitov (home-style), 148– 52, 161– 2 borders, 59, 61, 67, 74, 79 Bulgaria, 38, 54, 134, 146 Bulgarians, 38 – 40, 54 – 5 cafe´s, 125 –6, 129, 133, 138, 141 Chenggis Khaan, 167– 8, 173– 6, 180 Chis¸ina˘u, 39, 44 –52, 54, 56 citizenship, 24, 38 – 9, 42, 51, 54, 81, 133 clubs, 126, 129, 130, 132 – 4, 138– 43, 148 collective memory, 38, 44 – 6, 57 column, Trajan’s, 45 commemoration, 57 – 9 National Day, 45 communism, 59 conflict, 6, 46, 49, ethnic, 66 – 7 Transnistria, 39

consumption, 144, 146– 9 patriotic, 104– 7, 116– 17, 120– 1 Crimea, 116 – 17 sanctions, 118–21 cuisine, 148, 157, 159, 161 Bulgarian, 147 – 50, 154, 159– 60 French, 159 Italian, 148 popular, 144– 50, 154– 5, 159, 160– 1 pre-modern, 157 regional, 162 restaurant, 160 – 1 curriculum, 59, 61 – 6, 70, 72 – 3, 79, 81 diaspora, former Yugoslav, 14, 126, 129, 135, 142 emigration, 39 environment, 59, 70 – 1 ethnicity, Finno-Ugrians, 21, 27 textbooks, 27 ethno-cultural, 22, 39, 42 European Union, 70 European, Europeanness, 60, 66, 68– 70, 77, 80

212

INFORMAL NATIONALISM

Farrer, James, 133, 140 female/woman/women, 165, 167, 168– 71, 173, 175– 81 foreign policy, 104– 7, 111, 115, 121 Gagauz, 36, 38 – 9, 43, 55 Gayropa, 107, 114 gender, 65, 168, 170, 178– 9 roles, 169, 181 geopolitics, 107 – 8, 111, 114– 15, 118, 121 Goffman, Erving, 19, 23, 28, 33 Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 96 – 7 Great Patriotic War, 115– 16, 118– 19 grey zone, 37, 39 identity, 36 –41, 43– 4, 46, 48, 50 –1, 53 – 4, 144, 145, 147 – 9, 159– 60, 162 backstage, 19, 28 – 9, 32 – 3 ‘crisis’, 36, 53 ethnic, 8, 24– 5, 29, 31, 33, 57, 60 European, 69 minority, 19 – 22 Moldovan, 41, 44 national, 2 – 7, 9, 13 – 16, 58, 60 – 3, 67 –8, 73, 77, 79 – 80 negotiation, 18, 19, 28 passing, 27–8, 29– 30 politics, 38 – 41, 44, 47 – 9, 52 – 3 post-socialist, 2 reconstrucion of, 58 Soviet, 49 ideology, 63, 65, 73 – 4 Jewish, 38, 45, 55 Kishinev, 52 Kosovo, 62, 64, 68, 72 – 5, 78 – 9 language, 61 – 3, 68, 72 – 3, 77 – 8, 81 letters, Cyrillic, 51, 73 Latin, 51

AFTER

COMMUNISM

Matryoshja, 43 migrant, second generation, 135 minority, imperial, 43 Minsk, 98 – 9 Moldovanism, 41 civic, 41 ethnic, 41 – 2 Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, 41– 2 monuments, 44, 46 music, consumption, 124, 126 industry, 128 nation, 4 – 9, 11 – 16, 164– 72, 174– 5, 177–8, 180– 1 nation-building, 5– 6, 8 – 11, 16, 18, 37– 42, 44, 60, 79, 81, 164 – 8, 170–2, 184, 186 nationalising, 39, 44 nationalism, 43, 53, 55, 57– 8, 179, 184–5 banal nationalism, 36 – 7, 48, 52, 58, 80 – 1, 84 – 6, 104– 5, 125– 6, 144, 184 ethnonationalism, 94 everyday nationalism, 2, 4, 10– 12, 58, 80, 104 – 6, 121, 183– 7 ‘hot’ nationalism, 36 –7, 39, 57– 60 informal nationalism, 9, 15, 186 Orthodox, 49, 54 public, memory, 37, 44 – 7 space, 44 Putin, Vladimir, 4, 116– 19 religion, 7, 29, 32, 84, 128, 172 restaurant, 145, 147– 62 Romania, 36, 38 – 53, 56 Greater, 46 language, 43, 47, 49 – 51

INDEX Romanians, 39, 42 – 6, 48 –9, 51, 52 –3, 55 speaking, 41, 51, 55 Russia, 85– 96, 102 Russian, citizenship, 54 Empire, 43, 46 identity, 40, 43, 45, 52 language, 39, 42 – 3, 48 – 9, 51, 53, 56 pro-, 43 – 4, 48, 50 russkii mir (the Russian world), 88 schooling, post-Soviet, 18, 19 – 20, 21, 22 Tatarstan, 21 – 2 self-presentation, 145, 147, 149, 160 Soviet Union, 38 –44, 46– 7, 54, 56 collapse, 5, 85, 89 – 90, 106 ethnic politics, 24, 38, 166 state, 39 weak, 37, 40, 55 state-building, 6, 17, 37 – 8, 41, 53 statehood, 22, 24, 63–5, 68, 77, 79–80 statue, Lenin, 44, 46

213

stencil, 38, 46, 47 stigma, 19 – 20, 27 – 9, 31, 33 symbol, 7, 9, 11 – 14, 44 – 8, 58, 61, 79– 81, 85 – 6, 95 – 102, 107– 8, 115–18, 121, 128, 144, 185 Tiraspol, 39, 46, 47, 54 Transnistria, 36, 39, 43, 46, 49, 51, 55 state-building, 41 war, 46, 48 Turkey, 38 – 9 Ukraine, 4, 43, 49, 101– 2 Unionist, 42 – 3, 47, 54 – 5 United State of Russia and Belarus, 87 victimhood, 72, 77, 79 Vkontakte (VK), 107, 110, 112– 13, 117, 119 Westernisation, 95 Wolf, Capitoline, 44 – 5 World War II, 64 – 5, 72, 77 youth, 126, 130– 3, 136, 138, 140